Preview
DEAR FRANKIE
Starring Emily Mortimer, Jack McElhone and Gerald Butler
Directed by Shona Auerbach
Opens Friday, April 15
Check listings
The tale of a desperate mother, her deaf son and a mysterious stranger, Dear Frankie works hard to wrest those tears from your eyes. Thankfully, the movie deserves most of them.
The first feature by British director Shona Auerbach, Dear Frankie stars Emily Mortimer as Lizzie, a young Scottish woman who is utterly devoted to the welfare of nine-year-old Frankie (Jack McElhone). Lizzie can’t tell Frankie the reason they move house so often is that they’re on the run from his abusive father. She encourages the boy to believe his father is a kind-hearted sailor by sending him phony letters. When Frankie learns that the boat his father is supposedly on is coming to Glasgow, Lizzie hires a stranger (Phantom of the Opera hunk Gerald Butler) to participate in a well-intentioned but obviously foolhardy ruse.
Though its combination of social-realist drama, romantic fantasy and old-fashioned weeper risks being overbearing, Dear Frankie stays on the right side of sentimental. That’s largely due to the subtlety of the performances, the careful use of the Glaswegian locations and Auerbach’s ability to keep the story’s contrivances grounded in scenes that feel emotionally true. It also rates as a distinctive debut by the director, who first encountered Dear Frankie when she read Andrea Gibb’s script for a short-film version eight years ago.
"I think I was very drawn to it because it captured that unconditional love someone could have for someone else," says Auerbach, in a phone interview from her home near London. "It wasn’t just the mother-son thing – it was also the lengths people go to when they love someone else. They can sometimes get themselves in a mess. And the mother-son thing did hit a nerve because I was quite broody at the time and thinking about having my own family."
During the long process of developing the script with Gibb, Auerbach had two kids. Understandably, the experience gave her deeper insight into Lizzie’s actions. "Sometimes you get into a situation where you are forced to tell a lie or avoid the truth for protective reasons," she says. Yet the relationship between Lizzie and Frankie also reveals the ways in which children protect their parents, too. "Kids do that without you realizing. I know my own children do that with me.
"Part of the film draws from my experience with an old friend of mine. Her husband was quite violent and she had a very similar story to Lizzie’s. I drew on the pain she has gone through and how her own child ended up quite protective of the mum."
Mortimer and McElhone succeed at capturing that curious dynamic. When Auerbach was casting the film, she was very aware that the actors must be plausible together as mother and son. "There was no doubt in my mind that they worked," she says. "Emily made a big effort to get to know Jack. She had a day out with him beforehand and tried to have some normality with him. She got on the right level with him."
Equally plausible is McElhone’s attempt to convey Frankie’s experience of the world. "As with any actor, there’s always something you’ve got to learn for your part," says Auerbach. "His was a combination of learning sign language and understanding the issues surrounding deafness, everything down to eye contact. We spent a lot of time on that – getting that right was absolutely crucial. I went to deaf clubs with Jack and we had two deaf advisers. Jack really understood what he had to do."
Given the subject matter and emotional terrain, the obvious challenge to the director is deciding how much feeling is enough for a scene – it’s easy to go too saccharine. "As a director, you certainly have to find your line and try never to cross over it," says Auerbach. "I hope I haven’t gone over it, I really do.
"I think also it helped me a lot having a great editor. We had a similar sensitivity for knowing when it’s gone too far. But we still got very emotional many times in the edit suite. That meant the heart was in it 100 per cent."
The Czech film Kolya was one model for Dear Frankie, and it’s little surprise that both movies were picked up by Miramax, which has always had a jones for mawkish foreign fare. But Auerbach’s movie is superior to most examples of what’s been derisively tagged "Miramax porn." Instead, it has some of the same unfussy, bittersweet charm as another of Auerbach’s inspirations, Lasse Hallstrom’s My Life as a Dog.
"That film has always resonated with me," she says. "It’s always had something very, very special. Again, it felt like it never stepped over the line… but it got really close." |
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