Reviewed December 11, 2005
This is an engaging film that tells an interesting story. It's a story of a young mother and her nine-year-old son, Frankie Morrison. Frankie is deaf as a result of abuse by his father when he was an infant. This abuse is the reason Frankie's mother left his father and continues to evade him. Frankie's deafness, however, is almost incidental and the story hangs on a tale his mother has created in order to avoid telling him the truth.
This fantasy is that Frankie's father is not around because he is a sailor. Frankie writes to him at a local postal drop, believing that his letters are then dispatched to wherever his father is. His mother secretly picks up the letters at the postal drop and answers them, providing Frankie with a loving, albeit distant, father, sailing around the world on a ship whose name his mother picked at random.
Unfortunately, a ship with that name is discovered to be arriving at the Scottish port where Frankie lives and his mother's fiction is in danger of being revealed. In desperation she hires a man to impersonate Frankie's father for a few days while the ship is in port, and more than that I will not say.
Filmed in Scotland, "Dear Frankie" has a mood that fits the landscape - subtle, muted and quietly beautiful. The cast are excellent. Jack McElhone, playing Frankie, conveys his emotions and thoughts clearly in a non-speaking role. Frankie's mother (Emily Mortimer) and the "stranger" she hires (Gerard Butler) are also very good, as are all the supporting cast.
The essence of this film lies in understatement. There is no wild emoting going on here and the characters convey the depth of their emotions by finely tuned facial expressions and body language. Yet there is a danger in understatement and that is that it sometimes asks the audience to infer more than the text provides.
The only weakness in this otherwise admirable film lies in the building of the relationship between Frankie and the stranger hired to be his father. They apparently bond on the basis of sitting on the beach for while, and then running a race. The director has given us a rather cliché skipping stones scene at the beach but there is no tension in this relationship. Frankie is capable of charm and wit, yet he shows little of it to his erstwhile father. Similarly, his "father" apparently experiences no internal resistance to finding himself attracted to this boy. They "bond" but there is no substance to their bond. They do not go through anything with each other and for a relationship to have any dramatic substance, there must be at least a little conflict that, when resolved, satisfies the viewer.
Yet this is a minor quibble. Dear Frankie is a well-made film, truly Scottish in the care and precision with which it has been created. It is a delightful way to spend an hour and a half. I recommend it highly.
(Review by Brian Horne - all rights reserved.)
