Whatever you’re expecting from Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank, chances are you’re completely
wrong. The poster suggests it’s a quirky comedy along the lines of Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
It’s not. Frank is about a band of misfit,
eccentric musicians slowly imploding, the results being funny, uncomfortable
and tragic to watch.
Jon (Domhnall Gleeson) is a keyboard player who is taken
under the wing of Frank (Michael Fassbender), lead singer of experimental band,
the Soronprfbs. Frank wears a Frank Sidebottom papier-mâché head, which he refuses to
take off, while the rest of the band are all kinds of dysfunctional. What is
supposed to be a weekend touring across Ireland ends up with Jon and the rest
of the Soronprfbs shacked up in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere, not
leaving until Frank’s masterpiece album has been recorded.
Abrahamson’s film is a smart depiction of bands and
artists suffering from illusions of grandeur, the fine line between
inventiveness and pretentiousness. The problem is that Jon Ronson (who toured
with the late Chris Sievey’s comic creation, Frank Sidebottom) and Peter
Straughan’s script is a mess, with jarring shifts in tone. There are plenty of
bright ideas here, but when they’re mashed together into one ninety-minute
film, these ideas don’t come across as well as they should.
Frank
has
some truly funny moments: Jon’s reaction as he watches Maggie Gyllenhaal’s
Clara and Frank take one of his catchy melodies and turn it into something
genuinely offensive to the ears; Jon fighting with Frank as he tries removing
the man’s oversized head; best of the bunch, Frank trying to write what he
calls a “likeable song”. The script also throws in brutally honest observations
about suicide. Music has been a way for many artists to confront their demons,
yet what happens when being in a band becomes stifling? The Soronprfbs have no
audience; their fourteen hour days writing music is going nowhere and the band
are struggling to cope. The only band member who seems fine with the way things
are is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s theremin player, Clara. Despite her hostile, violent
personality, she acts as a mother to Frank, feeling responsible for him. Clara
knows Frank can’t cope with commercial success, hence why she goes out of her
way to ensure no one hears the band’s music. As well as all this you have Domhnall
Gleeson’s Jon, who has his own ideas as to which direction the band should be
heading; one where he gets fame, fortune, and thousands of Twitter followers.
These are all strong ideas, the problem is you can have
one scene where you’re snorting with laughter, followed by the next scene,
which throws themes of suicide and mental illness full pelt at the viewer. Very
often, Frank is awkward to sit
through as you occasionally find yourself wondering just what the hell you’re
watching.
What definitely works here is the acting. Fassbender is nothing
short of incredible, spending the majority of the film with his face hidden.
Wearing a papier-mâché
head and coming up with all sorts of zany ideas to create music, it would be
all too tempting to portray Frank as larger-than-life, but Fassbender gives a
gentle, subtle performance, making you care about a man who struggles to convey
what is going on inside his real, flesh and blood head. Domhall Gleeson is,
once again, brilliant. He’s a great character actor, whether it’s child-like
and sinister (the Black Mirror episode,
Be Right Back) or clumsy and socially
awkward (About Time). Here Gleeson
has a naïve charm about him as Jon, while also being far from whiter-than-white.
He manipulates Frank into helping him on the road to success, getting the band
a gig at the South by Southwest festival. It’s only when the inevitable damage
has been done that Jon ends up feeling guilty, trying his best to fix things.
Maggie Gyllenhaal gets the balance between being venom-spittingly anti-social,
but hiding a tender, vulnerable side absolutely spot on. She’s not
over-the-top, as several reviews have suggested, she is wholly believable
whenever she is onscreen (the funny as hell sex scene in a hot tub where,
during her ferocious, animal-like rutting Gyllenhaal very nearly drowns Gleeson,
is another priceless moment).
The best film I’ve seen centred around the music industry
is Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party
People, a bonkers mix of irreverent comedy and Icarus fall from grace
drama. Whether it’s down to the genius of Frank Cottrell Boyce’s script, Michael
Winterbottom’s direction, or sheer blind luck, the pace and tone goes all over
the place, yet the film absolutely, one-hundred-percent works. Sadly the same
can’t be said for Frank. Lenny
Abrahamson deserves praise for being so straight-talking about mental illness –
it’s touching, heart-breaking stuff at times – but the whole thing doesn’t sit
well. Abrahamson expects us to laugh at the Soronprfbs’ barmy behaviour, then
punch us in the gut with powerful insights into mental illness, and then follows this up with even more
offbeat humour. There’s no reason why a film with this structure can’t work,
but it feels like Abrahamson and screenwriters Jon Ronson and Peter Straughan
decided to throw everything at the wall and if it doesn’t stick, it doesn’t
matter.
Frank has
some well thought-out, eye-openingly original laughs, whilst also making you
well up because of how honest it is. You get the sense that Abrahamson wants
people to be comfortable talking about mental illness, that it’s not something
we should be shy or coy about; occasionally we should even laugh about it. The
problem is that the way Abrahamson has translated this onscreen, most of the
time, doesn’t work. Frank deserves points
for being one-of-a-kind, but it’s not the eccentric masterpiece that the film’s
poster suggests.
3 out of 5
Matt
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