Posted on 08/13/2014 11:55:51 PM PDT by Mount Athos
He plays a father in World’s Greatest Dad, a 2009 indie written and directed by fellow comedian Bobcat Goldthwait that may be the Williams role that I love best of all. It’s also one that is, for many reasons, almost unbearably sad to revisit now, not the least because it deals with themes of suicide, but also because its emotional epiphany is so hard-fought and so uncompromised, directly dealing with how people mourn and how we sanctify the dead.
Williams could go big (take Mrs. Doubtfire) and he could do weird (see his turn in Robert Altman’s live-action Popeye), but no other movie has allowed him quite the same combination of emotional honesty and recognition of how strange, dark, and hilarious life can be as World’s Greatest Dad did.
World’s Greatest Dad is pitch black, but it’s never mean, and I can’t help but thinking about it as the waves of appreciations and salutes roll in — not because there’s anything wrong with them, not at all, but because it’s inevitable that we think of people’s best selves when we grieve for them, smoothing over the more complicated, fallible figures they were when alive, looking at the ways (as I am here) in which they touched our own lives.
Like many great comedians, Williams’ gifts for laughter seemed parceled with that inner darkness, and its acknowledgement of that pairing is one of the reasons World’s Greatest Dad feels so resonant. It’s a role that showcases Williams’ underappreciated capacity for nuance — the scene in which he’s being comforted by a total stranger and can’t stop himself from giggling at the absurdity, a reaction the woman he’s talking to keeps mistaking for tears, passing him tissues.
[...]
“I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worse thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone.” It’s an observation to break your heart, but the sequence that it’s a part of is filled with such complex but exhilarated joy and mourning all at once. It’s the kind of role Williams could pull off so well. God, he’ll be missed.
I watched him last night in “The Fisher King”, and, I must say that that is his greatest performance, to me.
I am so fed up with the gushing forth of teary praise of this man after his committing suicide, and now he guaranteed a whole bunch of “why did he do it?” “how could he do it?” and other tearfully themed excesses. I’m from the old school that used to view these suicides in a negative theme rather than positive.
To say, as some people have, that he’s now making God laugh up in heaven is rather pathetic. Although he was a talented actor and comedian, he and he alone is now responsible for the cleanup of his life, such as the people who had to find is body, clean the mess up that he left, try to help his wife and children overcome the grief he’s caused, etc.
Oh, I’m sure he’s now guaranteed a standing ovation at the next Oscar awards when they mention his name and his family is left with wondering how “he could not find it in his heart to stay.” I pity his family and anybody else who had to clean up the mess he made.
He was a great comedian and a pretty good actor, but his attacks on conservatives such as Rush & Sara were nauseating.
I never saw anything but a twisted, troubled tortured soul in Robin Williams, couldn’t stand watching him.
Never was a row fan and thought his humor was childish. Bet he was on add drugs that made him suicidal.
He’s dead, Jim. Move on.
Dad’s who’s legacy to their children is his suicide are NOT the greatest.
Dad’s = Dads
This article is about a movie Robin Williams starred in called the greatest dad.
It doesn’t make any claims about him personally being a good dad.
I know that.
I find all this crying over Williams to be disgusting due to what he has done to his family, friends, and especially to his children!!
Suicide is just about as selfish and self-indulgent as you can get.
And before anyone starts on depression, I’ve been down that road several times and have myself spent weeks harboring suicidal thoughts - but I could never leave that legacy for my kids!!!
Sure, but mitigating all that is the fact that an integral part of severe depression is a loss of perspective.
Having the dark worldview that most liberals have could not have helped.
“Dad’s = Dads”
who’s = whose
Yes.
This was the last film I saw with Robin Williams and while I enjoyed it thoroughly, it was a VERY dark comedy. Brilliant and witty, but dark.
In it, he plays a lonely high school teacher, failed writer and father to an absolutely loathsome (and loathed) teenage son. His son accidentally hangs himself in auto-erotic asphyxia and Williams' character, humiliated, composes a phony suicide note. This note, naturally, changes everything.
And that doesn't means s*** to your kids, whom you just showed that you didn't care about enough about to hang around.
Oops - you’d never believe I actually got some education. Don’t try to eat post at the same time :-)
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