Great Night at Boston Independent Film Festival
Bobcat Goldwait Directs Robin Williams
By: Mark Favermann - Apr 30, 2009
With the venues spread around greater Boston from the ICA to the Somerville Theatre, the 2009 festival's outstanding fare included The Brothers Bloom by director Rian Johnson (Brick) starring Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz, The Burning Plain with Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger as well as Joseph Gordon-Leavitt and Zooey Deschanel in 500 Days of Summer. Several other provocative, thoughtful and highly entertaining films rounded out the schedule.
The festival was kick-started by The Brothers Bloom, a film by director Rian Johnson. It is a romantic comedy inside a con-game. The romance is between a mark and one of the confidence men. Like delicate water color, the comedy is lightly brushed throughout the film. The story takes the brothers from child con artists through their adulthood to their supposedly last score. The usual elaborate set pieces, unusual characters and multilayered confidence inducing machinery were all there. The appealing mark (the exquisite Rachel Weisz) and her reaction in the last score seem to break the formula and the story becomes more about relationships than the maguffin or plot device. Along with Weisz are phenomenal Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo. Robbie Coltrane and Maximilian Schell are wonderful. Exotic international locations add to the texture. The inspired narration is by con icon, slight of hand afictionado and magic historian/actor Ricky Jay. What a great way to start a terrific film festival. All of the volunteer organizers should be congratulated for this great festival.
This year's closing film was World's Greatest Dad, a dark, dark, even perverse but somehow fresh comedy about a single unhappy poetry teacher father Lance Clayton (Robin Williams) and his totally defiant, insolent, sexually-obsessed, no peculiarly perverted son Kyle (Daryl Sabara). This is coupled with the notion of being lonely is not necessarily the same as being alone. Also, the old adage of beware of what you wish for permeates the whole narrative. Lance faces the worst tragedy of his life and its greatest opportunity to achieve his dreams as a writer. He is able to be socially embraced, famous and rich. The problem is that he has to live with the gnawing knowledge of how all this was achieved. Young Sabara plays an excruciatingly detestable character while a restrained Williams has none of the mannerisms of his normal characterizations. This is an outstanding understated performance by Robin Williams.
Written and directed with even a small part as a chauffeur by Bobcat Goldwait, World's Greatest Dad is hip, clever and cringe-making at the same time. A bit like some of his best stand-up routines, this film clearly demonstrates the talents of Goldwait. He graciously and at times even eloquently answered questions for the large audience at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Humbly, he started by saying how hard (how friggin' hard) it was to be taken seriously by Sundance Film Festival organizers coming from such undistinguished films as the Police Academy series. Goldwait's screechy, singsong voice is not his real voice but his comic personality. Goldwait's real voice is as a skilled, witty writer and director. Who would of thought that Bobcat Goldwait would have become an auteur?