Review: ‘Uncle Frank’
The Bledsoe family live in Creekville, South Carolina, the sort of little, nowhere town that feels too small for anything to ever happen, too big to ever truly escape. Frank (Paul Bettany) did manage to get out, years ago, and lives now as a debonair professor of literature out in New York, alongside his boyfriend Walid (Peter Macdissi). But he still finds himself borne back time and time again, both to his father’s house and to the self he has to pretend to be when he’s there. His niece, Beth (Sophia Lillis) hasn’t gotten out yet, fears she never will. Growing up in Creekville has convinced here that if she wanders beyond its boundaries and the narrow vision of life which it embodies, she’ll lost.
In their relationship with each other, Frank and Beth begin try to find an answer to the question which he poses to her at the beginning of the film: “Are you gonna be the person you decide to be or are you gonna be the person everyone else tells you you are?”
It’s a film, primarily, about fear. How it passed on, absorbed and warped over time. How it can turn us against the people we love, even against ourselves. But these are deep, dark waters for a film that is too keen to tread lightly to really delve into them.
So much of the dialogue feels too much like Frank’s question – cutely composed and trailer-ready, but more a matter of one character pontificating thoughts about love and life in the vague direction of a listener rather than of two people trying to reckon with the complexities of themselves and their lives. The cast all give rich performances full of warmth and delicate touches, but the script largely fails to provide them with nuance to match.
As the lead, Bettany radiates a charming intellect protected by a wall of carefully constructed Southern machismo while Lillis is all bright Bambi eyes, in total wonder of the world around her, discovering each new sort of person with honest fascination. But we never really get much under their skin. Beth gets the odd sharp line and delivers it with relish before falling back into a sort of generic ingénue, while Frank is fleshed out with clunky flashbacks of his tragic backstory and a drinking problem, both of which play out in melodramatic cliches. The other family members are also played with aplomb by excellent actors like Judy Greer and Margot Martindale, but they never gain more definition than the basic archetypes that they start out as.
The essential shallowness of its characterisation comes to the fore when the film builds towards its central conflicts. We have family love and loyalty being played off against a bigotry that’s been engrained over decades and backed up by equally deep-rooted ideas about manliness, godliness and right. We have a pained desire to live truthfully matched against a paralysing fear of being rejected and ostracised. It’s the most foundational parts of who these characters are going to war with one another, decades of buried trauma and abuse suddenly geyser-ing out towards the surface, yet the film strolls through it in an almost perfunctory manner. It’s less interested in the conflict in all its messy, meaningful emotion than it is in the cosy resolution which can follow. The fuzzy ending which lets everyone go home happy.
And, to be honest, 2020 has made it kind of hard to take shots at anything for just trying to make people feel good. Between the tender, charming performances and the sun-dappled, intimate look of the movie, Uncle Frank is overwhelmingly pleasant, and there is a real temptation just to buy into its sugary sweet, “Just Be Yourself!” messaging. Because it is a really, really nice movie. But the film itself lands on the trouble with this when Walid talks about the problem with “nice” while chastising the Bledsoe family for their unshakeable politeness – “nice” is not the same as “good”, and so often it provides cover for the bad.
The niceness of Uncle Frank involves constructing a narrative in which an ultra-conservative family who lived their lives in thrall to a violently abusive, bigoted patriarch would turn on a dime to embrace their newly outed relative. It’s the same sort of “We did it!” feeling which films like Green Book thrive on, treating prejudice like a part of history which we’ve overcome thanks to good, decent folks like the Bledsoe clan. A victory lap for a battle that, in reality, still rages on. There’s a central dishonesty to it which reduces its sweetest moments to pure confectionary – enjoyable in the moment, containing nothing of substance.
And so Uncle Frank is a very nice movie, just not a very good one. – Ross McIndoe
Rating: 2/5
Uncle Frank is now streaming on Amazon Prime.