There’s this scene in the 2009 film World’s Greatest Dad where the beleaguered Lance Clayton, played by Robin Williams, discovers his dead son. The kid is a victim of accidental total erotic asphyxiation, and yet the scene is one of the most heartbreaking I’ve ever seen. It’s all the more remarkable because the musical overlay robs Williams of his voice, the tool that he used to carry so much expression in his other work. Instead, you just have to witness his silent anguish, and then the brave front he puts on as he rearranges the scene to look like a suicide.
I watched this scene when the film came out, and it cracked something open inside me. World’s Greatest Dad is a comedy, first and foremost, but there are moments of terrible darkness in there. Lance is a tortured writer in a world that doesn’t care about tortured writers. The film mines that conceit for comedy and tragedy both.
This is the same film that has the now-infamous line that did the rounds in the wake of Williams’s death - you know, the one where he says, grim-faced, “suicide is a solution to temporary problems”. I felt sick to my stomach when I saw people sharing that line with the comment that he should have “taken his own advice”. First of all, because screw you; second, though, because that glib line is intended to be glib in the context of the film. You know why that clip has his character’s name captioned under his face? It’s because by this point in the film, Lance has parlayed his son’s suicide into a successful literary career, faking his own kid’s journal and selling hundreds of thousands of copies. He’s become a megastar and a role model on completely false grounds, and when he says that line he’s being interviewed by the film’s stand-in for Oprah. It’s a deeply cynical moment.
Why does any of that matter, though? It matters because the Robin Williams I’ve seen in countless interviews and stand-up specials and sketches and defining comedic and dramatic roles would have turned up his nose in disgust at that kind of condescending advice. The roles that Williams played were filled with subtext, and hidden layers of meaning, and played with uniform brilliance. Even in that ten-second clip, you can see how conflicted and uncomfortable Lance Clayton is in this new role as an unqualified self-help guru, in the tiny expressive shifts in his face and the world-weary eyes staring out of the screen.
Even in his louder roles, Robin Williams brought so much nuance to the way he acted. He was the first actor I saw who really made me realise what wit is. It’s not necessarily being consistently funny - anyone can make dumb jokes - but it’s more about creating an environment where the people around you are constantly racing to catch up. Williams did this regardless of whether he was being funny or sad - there was always something more going on. You can watch him for the third and fourth time and still find something new.
At times, he lived an incredibly messy life, but you can’t help but think that maybe it was that way because he was even outrunning himself. As an experience extended over a couple of hours, Robin Williams was an exhilarating experience; living your whole life that way could easily turn exhausting, I guess. It’s hard to deal with depression when your head stops you from slowing down and unpacking everything.
Or maybe this is wide of the mark, and the Williams behind closed doors was an eternity away from his public persona, the one that wore his troubles and his sense of humor and his brutal, hilarious honesty on his sleeve; you don’t want to make any assumptions with this kind of thing. But he killed himself, and last night I cried silently for a few minutes in the dark, and the world for a moment felt a little less sparkling with brilliance.
