EIFF reviews: World's Greatest Dad | Pelican Blood | Red Hill

Published on Wednesday 16 June 2010 19:08

Robin Williams is back on form in a very black comedy, and although the plotting could have done with a polish, it holds together – unlike an ill-conceived story of birdwatchers and an Aussie Western

• Robin Williams makes good on the black comedy of World's Greatest Dad.

IN World's Greatest Dad (***), Robin Williams gets the best showcase he's had for his comic talents in well over a decade. Thank writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait for tapping into the darker side Williams explored to such satisfying effect in One Hour Photo and Insomia and putting this to use in a pitch-black comedy that takes aim at the sometimes-sickening way people mythologise the dead.

Neatly subverting his most famous film role in Dead Poet's Society, Williams plays Lance, an unpopular poetry teacher a million miles away from that film's inspirational optimist. An unpublished would-be writer with nothing to show for his efforts, his life is a catalogue of disappointments, none more so than the teenage son he's raising by himself.

This is Kyle, an unpopular and problematic 15-year-old student at Lance's school whose online viewing habits and onanistic experimentation run to the more extreme end of the sexual spectrum.

Played to obnoxious perfection with an admirable lack of shame by former Spy Kids star Daryl Sabara, Kyle is a wonderfully belligerent creation, horrifyingly believable, yet, in a strange way, oddly likeable.

As the irony-drenched title implies, the film hinges on Lance and Kyle's strained relationship, but Goldthwait puts a twist on this that helps the film reach new levels of knuckle-gnawing discomfort. This mostly involves Lance suddenly finding himself willing and able to exploit Kyle's life to fulfil his own dream of becoming a published writer, but it's to the film's credit that this doesn't happen in quite the way you might expect (autoerotic asphyxiation and piano-playing MOR troubador Bruce Hornsby figure prominently).

Goldthwait, whose previous film, Sleeping Dogs Lie, could loosely be described as a bestiality-themed romcom, is good at weaving the freakishly perverse into the everyday without the results seeming too forced, but he's less successful at tying the film's loose ends together in a satisfying way that doesn't seem contrived. Still, it's good to see Williams in something more worthy of both his comedic and dramatic abilities.

Coincidentally, freakishly perverse sexual practices also feature in Pelican Blood (**). Unfortunately, here they're little more than window dressing designed to spice up an otherwise dreary, try-hard misfire. Based on a cult novel about a suicidal couple involved in the obsessive world of, erm, birdwatching, Pelican Blood boasts a young up-and-coming-cast and a vaguely cool contemporary Brit-rock soundtrack, factors that seem to have inspired rather optimistic chatter likening this to Trainspotting – a comparison that might have had some validity had Trainspotting been about actual trainspotters rather than heroin addicts.

Pelican Blood's laboured attempts to make the obsessive world of "twitchers" – birdwatchers who go to extreme lengths to observe every species of rare bird – appear sexy and exciting is certainly a taller order than this desperately irritating and dramatically flat film can fulfil. Chief among its problems is the main character, Nikko (Harry Treadway), a frequenter of suicide websites whose first attempt to kill himself left his elder sister in the hospital with stab wounds when she tried to intervene.

Having avoided a stint in an asylum, he's put his OCD tendencies to more productive use as a house cleaner. He's still planning to attempt suicide again, but only after he's ticked off from his list every one of the 500 species of bird found in the UK.

With only a few to go, his imminent demise should, in theory, give the film some ticking-clock momentum, but it's hard to care about someone who comes across as a self-obsessed moron rather than a sensitive and damaged individual. Nikko's acts of rebellion, for instance, amount to little more that petulant attention-seeking acts, such as parading naked through his sister's house in front of her humourless husband.

Unfortunately, Nikko's irritation factor is ratcheted up a good few notches when he falls once more into a destructive relationship with animal rights activist Stevie (Emma Booth). Her provocative underwear-dancing and penchant for huffing helium push him ever closer to the edge, until an incident with a firearm obliterates what few shreds of dramatic credibility remain for the sake of a convenient ending. Some of these faults could have been overcome with some inspired direction or charismatic performances, but there's so little energy on screen that the prospect of the main characters killing themselves becomes the only thing to relish.

Similarly disappointing is Red Hill (***) a modern-day Australian Western that starts off like a lean, mean Walter Hill movie but ends up a bit Blazing Saddles. It's not meant to be a comedy, but the cheeseball script, winking nods to genre convention and hokey plotting sabotage an impressively terse and stunningly shot first half that sees the titular town put on lock-down after a prison break results in the escape of a deadly Aboriginal convict the cops are convinced is on his way home to settle old scores.

True Blood's Ryan Kwanten is the new-in-town cop who starts smelling a rat with the town folks' version of events. Alas, when the bullets start flying, the unintentional genre parody becomes more pronounced and first time writer/director Patrick Hughes doesn't help matters with his cheap-shot denouement.

• World's Greatest Dad is at the Cameo, tonight, 8:25pm and Cineworld, 26 June, 6:15pm. Pelican Blood is at Cineworld tonight, 6:30pm and tomorrow, 9pm. Red Hill is at the Cameo, tonight, 8pm and 23 June, 8:25pm