FRANK BY NAME, BY NATURE
Taut, emotional film sports fine cast, while featuring great pacing and tension
Sometimes simple is best. Clocking in at just 95 minutes, Uncle Frank tells a deceptively straightforward story about Frank, a gay man attending the funeral of his father in 1970s America.
The man is played by Paul Bettany, a decent actor who's been sidelined of late playing a second-tier superhero in the Marvel cinematic universe. (Here's hoping his reprisal of the character in next year's Disney+ series Wandavision is as good as the trailers suggest.)
But the real revelation in this movie is Sophia Lillis as Beth, Uncle Frank's niece. She was Beverly in the horror movie It and also starred in the underwhelming fairy-tale horror Gretel and Hansel, which I'm amazed to learn came out in January. Like everything else from just before the pandemic set in, it feels like years ago.
Beth is smart but sheltered, growing up in a fictional backwater South Carolina town called Creekville. Uncle Frank got out long ago and works as a professor in New York City — the opening scene finds Beth, aged
14, chatting with him during one of his rare visits home, trying to figure out why this lovely man is a disgrace to the family.
Cut to four years later and
Beth is attending the very college where Uncle Frank teaches. She is mildly surprised to learn that her uncle is in a relationship with Wally (Peter Macdissi), a gregarious Saudi with a bushy beard and an easygoing manner.
But before she can fully process this news comes word that her grandfather — Frank's dad — has died of a heart attack. Uncle and niece hop in the car (Beth's mom is afraid of flying and won't let her daughter on a plane) and head south for the funeral. Wally decides to tag along, much to Frank's annoyance and the movie's benefit.
Uncle Frank is the latest from writer-director Alan Ball, whose early-2000s series Six
Feet Under was groundbreaking television in several respects, not least in that it included a realistic portrayal of a gay man in a lead role, played by Michael C. Hall.
With this tale, set just a few years after the Stonewall Riots and at the very beginning of the gay rights movement, there's no hiding the fear, mistrust and uncertainty with which Frank lives. But we also see in Beth a new generation, and Lillis perfectly captures the young woman's quietly watchful, unworldly yet open-minded personality.
She's also responsible for much of the movie's humour, like the scene in which a rural gas-station attendant makes a clumsy pass at her, and she verbally cuts him, so adroitly he doesn't even know he's bleeding.
She's even more incredulous when Wally, even though he's thoroughly enjoyed every moment of the young's man comeuppance, suggests she look at things from his point of view. But Beth isn't having any of that: “It's my fault he's a creep?”
Uncle Frank features a fine roster of supporting players, including Judy Greer and Steve Zahn as Beth's parents, and Stephen Root and Margo Martindale as her grandparents. They're uncultured without ever quite sliding into caricature, and I loved watching Greer's character meeting a Jew for probably the first time in her life and trying to say the right thing: “Mazel Top!”
But where the film truly succeeds is in its pacing. Editor Jonathan Alberts has worked on some fine dramas in the past few years, including 45 Years and Lean on Pete, both by Andrew Haigh. Here, he and Ball work to craft Frank's backstory through perfectly timed flashbacks. At first, the sun-dappled dramatizations of young Frank's first love seem like nothing more than happy memories, and maybe not even that vital to the story at hand. It's only later we realize how much regret is bound up in those recollections, and just why his dad was so cold toward him.
It all leads up to a reading of the will, and a third-act emotional gut punch that will leave viewers reeling. And then, somehow, Ball keeps the emotional tension consistently taut for about the last 20 minutes of the movie. Every time I thought I could relax and exhale, he'd catch me with another powerful moment.
I kind of hated him for it, to be honest — when does emotion devolve into mere sentimental exploitation? — but in the end the prevailing feeling was one of admiration, even awe. When Frank says to an elderly relative, “I know that is the very best that you're capable of,” it's just about as pure a moment of catharsis as you're likely to get from a movie this year.