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Movie Review: Dear Frankie

By William Sternman

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Dear Frankie
Starring Emily Mortimer and Jack McElhone
Written by Andrea Gibb
Directed by Shona Auberbach

Mirabile dictu!

No jiggling boobs or gyrating buns.

Not a single blood-splattered wall. (Did you ever wonder why, even in the most violent movie, a person standing in the center of the room is never shot? Now you know; spread the word.)

No language so gratuitously foul that even the gutters turn red with shame.

Not even a note of intrusive, abusive music, so loud that it makes the fillings in your teeth resonate in time!

Who could have imagined such a thing, especially in an American movie? Alas, this movie isn’t American. (You’re not surprised, are you? Really?) It’s British.

Somewhere along the line we Yanks have lost touch with our own emotions so completely that only the vulgar, the obscene, the outlandish, the outré can make us feel anything at all. All to music that is so loud and jolting that you can’t hear yourself think (why would you want to?) or feel (why should you have to?). As with any narcotic, however, as we become habituate to the effect, we have to ratchet up the intensity to get a jolt.

We’re no longer interested in seeing movies about ordinary people, like you and me, doing their best to solve their everyday problems. These people are too tame, too real, too human for us. But not for the Brits.

This touching movie, written by Andrea Gibb and directed by Shona Auerbach, is about a nine-year-old deaf boy whose whole life centers around his dad, who is traveling around the world on the HMS Accra. He tracks his dad’s progress on a big wall map and treasures the stamps that the man sends him from around the world.

Most of all, Frankie looks forward to the letters from his dad and pours himself into his replies.

What Frankie doesn’t know is that his mother intercepts his letters at the post office and writes his “dad’s” letters herself, enclosing international postage stamps that she buys at the local philatelist.

Why the deception? Because Frankie and his mother are on the lam from his real father, who in a fit of rage hit his infant son so hard that he caused his deafness. They have finally settled in a Scottish seaside town.

One day Frankie learns that the real HMS Accra will soon be docking there. Naturally, Frankie is excited at the prospect of meeting the father he doesn’t remember. Rather than disillusion her son, his mother hires a stranger to pretend to be his father during the Accra’s brief stay.

That’s it: a simple story, with a little twist, about real people trying to get on with their lives.

Appropriately, the writing and direction are also down-to-earth and the actors so real that you could really believe you’re eavesdropping on someone else’s life. This is a true reality show, as opposed to the ones where unreal people do disgusting things in order to titillate your jaded emotions and pander to your sadism.

Jack McElhone plays Frankie as though he were just any boy you’d see in a schoolyard. There is no attempt on his part to wring our hearts because of the boy’s deafness, isolation from his fellow students or the deception he’s unwittingly living. When the emotions are real, there’s no need to ramp them up.

If you saw Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, you already know how quietly compelling Gerard Butler can be. As the stranger pretending be Frankie’s father, he is so soft-spoken, laid-back and self-effacing that you wish with all your might that he would stay and be Frankie’s father forever. In close-up, his eyes are so compelling that you almost can’t tear your own away until the camera angle shifts.

Emily Mortimer is perfect as Frankie’s mother and never loses your sympathy for a moment, even in the closing scenes when she acts like what could be called an “unfeeling bitch.” Without her hardness (and scenarist Gibb’s ability to resist a cliché), this scene could have turned maudlin, giving the movie an unearned feel-good ending as everybody goes off to the seashore.

Because of who he actually turns out to be, there’s the slightest of hints that the stranger may return, but you don’t hold out much hope for that. Nor should you.

In the very last scene, Frankie comes to grips with reality in a surprising way and you know that he no longer needs the stranger anyway. It’s a trifle incredible, and certainly unprepared-for, but I wanted to believe it, so I did.


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William Sternman's short stories have been published in England, Hungary, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, as well as the U.S. His book and movie reviews have appeared in Audience, Films in Review, Bestsellers, The Drummer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Herald, The St. Petersburg Times and www.movie-vault.com. He has been a volunteer tutor at the Center for Literacy since 1998. He received a fellowship grant in literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

© 2005 Me Three