Review: World's Greatest Dad (15)****

Middle-aged, single and a wannabe writer with no commissions... teacher Lance Clayton hasn't got a whole lot going for him.

He's embroiled in a murky relationship with a fellow teacher who's a flake and a phoney and who won't go public with their affair.

And his teenage son, Kyle, is obsessed with internet porn from where he gets the notion to experiment with auto-erotic asphyxiation.

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When Lance catches the boy in the act, his shared embarrassment with the mortified teen prompts him to do nothing.

But when Kyle repeats his experiment and dies, a grieving Lance cleans up the scene to persuade Kyle's friends, schoolmates and the authorities that he committed suicide.

He pens an elegiac note that rehabilitates the unpopular boy in death. Overnight Kyle becomes a cult – first at his school, then across America.

Lance's poetry class surges with new blood. Kyle the dork becomes a posthumous poster boy. And that's when dad's carefully constructed charade begins to unravel...

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Bobcat Goldthwait's hard-hitting comedy/drama is built on dissembling, fakery and falseness. And it proves how each and every one of us can manipulate the facts to create a fantasy world to serve our own purposes.

Lance's deception begins as an act of love from a father to a son. Rapidly it spirals out of control until events are controlling the grieving father rather than the other way around.

But Goldthwait's script also considers the bovine nature of the mob, and how all of us can be led by the nose into believing what we want to believe. Williams is excellent as the put-upon little man who finds himself elevated to an icon of bereavement. The film is a sharp portrait of emotional fraud that places an ordinary father at the heart of a magnificent deception.

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