Dear Frankie
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Movie Reviews of Dear Frankie
Movie Review: More than a sentimental story . . .
Summary: 5 Stars
This story of a single mother and her deaf son pulls at the heart strings while avoiding the cliches that would have turned it into a standard Hollywood-style romance. Lizzie (Emily Mortimer), on the run from an abusive husband, keeps alive her nine-year-old son's wish for a loving father by writing him letters from what he's led to believe is his sailor father, aboard a cargo ship sailing the high seas. Complications arise when a ship by the same name docks in the town where they are living, and she hires a sailor to impersonate the boy's father for a day.
The cast is just fine, with Sharon Small from TV's Inspector Lynley series as a supportive friend to Lizzie, who helps her find a man to play Frankie's father. Meanwhile, Jack McElhone as Frankie provides an intelligent and affecting portrayal of a boy dealing manfully with his disability and life's obstacles, while protecting his mother and her illusions. Intended chiefly as a story about a mother and son, the film also touches (perhaps unwittingly, given the director's comments) on the often unsatisfied need among men for fathers who were emotionally - if not physically - more available in their young lives. In that respect, the sailor, played wonderfully by Gerard Butler, takes on an almost mythic quality. Set in Scotland and shot in and around Glasgow, the film has a coolly northern feel at times, which is appropriate for the bittersweetness of what it has to say about people and what is in their hearts. The DVD includes interviews with the cast and filmmakers, and a director's commentary.
Movie Review: Moving...
Summary: 5 Stars
Film set is a seaport town of Greenock, Scotland in the early 2000's. Lizzie Morrison, is a young single mother who cares for her 9 year old deaf son (Frankie) and her elderly Mother (Nell). Lizzie continues to move her son and Mother from town to town to hide from her former husband. Lizzie decides to fabricate a positive role model for the boy by creating and trading letters between Father and son. The Father being a sailor who sends the boy letters from various points of call - and the son captivated by the stories of his journeys of the sea and other lands. The scheme hits trouble when one of Frankie's troublesome schoolmates finds out that the Father's make-be-believe ship is actually coming to Greenock - so he bets Frankie that his Father won't show. Lizzie is torn between telling her son the truth and coming up with a solution to the predicament. Eventually she finds a Father impersonator who agrees to play the role of Father in exchange for payment. And the story takes off from here...
The film is exceptionally well casted. Lizzie plays the role of the caring, doting Mother. Nell, Lizzie's Mother, is a sharp tongued, worry-wart Mother. Frankie, is quiet, determined, kind hearted and thirsts to see and have a relationship with his Father. The film keeps you in suspense for most of the journey. This is an emotional film about the iron ties of Mother to child...the importance of family and friends to pull you through the most difficult times...and the power of human spirit. Great film...
Movie Review: Brilliant film!
Summary: 5 Stars
I can't say when I last watched such a lovely, quietly heartfelt, heartbreaking but uplifting film.
The truly wonderful thing about it was how underplayed it was. Everything happens and you know it happens, and yet it's hardly ever externalised. It's all inside the characters. The basic plot could have been really pat and melodramatic -- deaf boy's mother invents a story that his dad is at sea, the ship comes in, she has to find dad for the day -- but instead of being melodramatic, it comes across as human and profound.
Emily Mortimer, who plays the boy's mother, is fantastic. Somewhere along the way you realise that this story is about her fantasy as much as about the boy's (or more so), and the way she manages to convey her own life history without ever really giving it away is amazing.
The same is actually true of Gerard Butler's character, though we find out even less about him. His character development happens entirely on the inside, practically without dialogue and yet you're there for it all, and you catch all the little changes.
And of course, the little boy is superb -- it's such a great character, too. A clever, sly but thoughtful and loving boy, who doesn't feel sorry for himself. He seems to be straightforward at first, but in light of what we find out at at the end of the movie, you begin to reassess his actions and realise that he's just as "internalised" and deep as the adults.
Anyway, if you haven't yet seen this movie, you really must!
Movie Review: Small film with a huge heart
Summary: 5 Stars
This beautifully crafted film is a must see for anyone with a heart. In a film where words are practically unnecesssary I find it almost impossible to think of the proper words to describe it. The director,Shona Auerbach, who is also the director of photography, displays a subtle touch throughout - from the colorscape of the Scottish seaside, to the development of the characters, to the way that the 3 main characters interact and ultimately transform one another's lives. Emily Mortimer is lovely and believable as Lizzie, the young mother desperate to protect her deaf son from the truth of his father, and equally desperate to "hear his voice" through the letters he writes to the seaman father she's created for him. Jack McElhone as Frankie is far from a maudlin child with a disability. He is filled with curiousity and intelligence and humor despite his vagabond existence with his mom and grandmother. Gerard Butler as the unnamed Stranger hired by Lizzie to play dad-for-a-day is incredible in what he is able to convey just through small gestures and his amazing eyes. My favorite scene in the film is of The Stranger's face as seen through a fish tank as he watches young Frankie. The transformation that comes over the character in this quiet moment says more than 10 pages of dialogue could ever have done. The beautiful music is well-suited to the whole mood of the movie - bringing to mind a gently moving river that takes you on a family's journey from fear of the past to hope for the future.Movie Review: Very well-structured, paced, and acted.
Summary: 5 Stars
Lizzie Morrison (Emily Mortimer) is a woman who's been writing letters to her 9-year-old deaf son (Jack McElhone) for years as if she were his missing father (Cal Macaninch). The father has been out of the picture so long that the boy has no idea what his father looks like. Living with Mom and the boy is Grandma (Mary Riggans), who has a habit of looking in the paper on a daily basis to see if a very specific ad is there as usual: a missing person's ad looking for Mom. On one occasion after seeing this ad the grandmother makes a call telling the person on the other end of the line to just leave them alone. It is at this point that we suspect that the father was a wife-beater and that the two women had to pack up the kid to escape from the abuse.
Unfortunately for Mom, she randomly picked, from a postage stamp, the name of the ship Dad was supposed to have been on all these years. And that ship is coming into port. Now, after learning about the ship from a classmate, the kid expects a surprise visit from his father.
What's the mother to do? The grandmother implores her to just tell the kid the truth. But Mom decides to find a man that she can pay to pretend to be the boy's father for just one day. That man is Gerard Butler.
My writing doesn't do justice to this well-structured, paced, and acted movie, which surprised me on a at least three occasions and had me bawling my eyes out from about two-thirds onward.
I highly recommend it.