Do you remember James Frey? The guy who wrote “A Million Little Pieces” all the way back in 2005? You remember all that hullabaloo about it being “fake”? Well, take that whole controversy as you will, but I honestly couldn’t see the big fuss about it. The whole Oprah thing? Stupid. It was strange to think that ‘alterations’ suddenly explode into something as profound as ‘lying’. For God’s sake the man originally wanted it published as a novel and was rejected. Is really so hard to understand his desire to be create, what he dubbed, ‘a dramatic arc’? Either way, his subsequent status as a pariah is a topic well-suited to Lance Clayton, the sad-sac HS poetry teacher who literally ghostwrites his dead son’s lyrical suicide note in order to spare the family the embarrassment of the circumstances surrounding his accidental demise.
This more recent send-up by writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait, is part satirical, part commentary, part gross-out comedy, and is strangely satisfying in the way it tries to maneuver the kinds of hypocrisies that come out of such media circuses as the one just under discussion. If you take a look at Goldthwait’s filmography you might notice that he’s struck out more than a few times. Which is probably the reason why I found this little shape-shifting gem to be something of a surprise.
I’ll admit, at times Clayton (evinced by a restrained but always disarmingly witty Robin Williams) does run the risk of becoming just another passive schmuck as he waddles around the teacher’s lounge or barges in on his son masturbating. But the unusual structure of the story can be forgiven if you’ve got the patience to sit through a few dirty jokes. And once the immature phase of the film is over, there’s an astonishing soul to it, devolving into a kind of light-hearted Edgar Allan Poe story. That is, if Poe had enjoyed the merits of jokes surrounding autoerotic asphyxiation.
The celebrity of death and the falsity of that perversion which ultimately reigns over it seems to be the underlying “lesson” of what can only be described as a cautionary tale. But in the end, what redeems a rather lopsided dramedy from becoming predictable is a good handful of honest truisms. Some of them are sad and others just kind of awkward. All are crafted with a skill you wouldn’t have thought possible by a man like Goldthwait. You don’t know quite how to feel at first but I suppose that’s the beauty of genre-bending films. You get the sense that it no longer is trying to be popular with us as an audience, fibbing through gritted teeth, satiating our appetites for sloppy, easily-defined entertainment. The movie seems to free itself of these insecure labels which threaten to beat the scenario back into a submissive, conformist gut-buster. So for those of you expecting a nice neat little package of a movie…don’t. This won’t go the way you want it to. It’s a discipline that, maybe with the help of a Bowie song or two, could say more than a suicide note ever could.
Best When:
A.) You feel like no one is on your side. B.) You enjoy pitch-black irony.
C.) You’re pro-Towelie. D.) You’ve always wanted to know what it would be like to watch the “Anti-Dead Poet’s Society”.
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