Frank, 2014.
Directed by Lenny Abrahamson.
Starring Michael Fassbender, Domhnall Gleeson, Scoot McNairy and Maggie Gyllenhaal.
SYNOPSIS:
Jon, a young wanna-be musician, discovers he’s bitten off more than he can chew when he joins an eccentric pop band led by the mysterious and enigmatic Frank.
What is true creative genius and where do the boundaries between this and mentally compulsive obsession lie? Does success make you happy? Is social media a true reflection on what people actually like and care about? Director Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank attempts to comment on these questions whilst walking the tightrope between oddball comedy and tragic character study and hits the mark more often than misses.
Frank is most enjoyable when it’s working as an off-beat, quirky comedy, which is the majority of the first half of this swift 95 minute feature. Jon Burroughs (Domhnall Gleeson), a young man with aspirations to becoming a songwriter is severely struggling with turning those aspirations into anything resembling a reality; the film opens with us hearing his internal voice trying to make up songs from anything he sees whilst walking through town to comically bad results. He sees a man trying to commit suicide in the sea only to realise he is the keyboard player of a band who are playing in a local club that very night. The band are watching on, which should give Jon a clear sign to walk away but he ends up getting the gig as the replacement keyboardist; the gig is a disaster but it is here where he meets Frank (Michael Fassbender), the band’s creative lead who just so happens to wear a papier-mâché head all day, every day.
The band, together with their newly appointed member Jon, rent an isolated holiday home in Ireland to work on their new album, and it’s here where the film is at it’s most charming and amusing. Frank’s obsessive nature means the band spend eleven months together before a song is even recorded, as he works on creating new sounds and making new instruments as seen through the bewildered eyes of Jon, who also provides voiceover charting the ups and downs of the process. I liked the struggle for Frank’s attention between Jon and Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal), where Jon wants to emulate Frank’s creative mind and Clara wants to protect him; all the time Frank shows no real indication of how he feels, just mumbles some nonsense or chases people with a shovel, or takes showers with a transparent plastic bag over his paper head, whilst never thinking about the band’s growth. Perhaps he doesn’t care for success, as long as he’s surrounded by the ones who love him for who he is.
Jon, on the other hand, has been touting the band through social media and finally gets them a discovery act gig at a festival in Texas. As the film moves into this new surrounding, the tone shifts from comedy and quirky to sadness and the realisation of who Frank is under the paper head and is revealed to be more than mere eccentricities of a front man. The isolation of the house in Ireland allows Frank to feel secure in himself, but out in the open where expectations are made and he is lined up to be judged, Frank and Jon no longer share the same dreams. The tonal shift is hard and uneven compared to what came before and the film loses its creative edge and unpredictability, gearing towards the usual band-breaks-up-and-falls-apart routine and asks the viewer to stretch their sympathies for Frank a little too far considering we hardly know the man up until this point in the movie; the mystery of who Frank is is interesting but when he is used for emotional gravitas the film overstretches its reach. The more dramatic parts also shows weakness in Domhnall Gleeson’s acting range; as a comedic lead he is quite good, reminding me of Simon Pegg before he starred in blockbusters (and became exceptionally annoying) but he hasn’t the acting chops to be the lead when the film gets darker.
Lenny Abrahamson’s direction is quiet, deliberately unpretentious (considering the type of characters and their music) and fitting for this type of material, but his use of social media is grating; but he’s not alone here. This is the third film I’ve seen this year (alongside Chef and Non-Stop) where mobile phone messages, tweets, or other social media outputs appear on screen with their icons. First of all it is lazy storytelling (the same way watching a character use Google used to be) and in no way innovative, and worst still it will age the film terribly. I hope it’s just a fad because, as much as I like using the internet myself, I dislike seeing it creeping into movies just so they can appear current and keeping up with the trends.
One aspect of Frank is always consistent, however, and that is Michael Fassbender. Despite covering his head for very nearly the entire time he is on screen, Fassbender shows a range of emotions with his body language, gestures, and voice to create a character behind the mask and conjure up the mystery of who Frank is. Often he says the emotion he has behind the paper head (“Flattered grin followed by bashful smile””) and you just feel Fassbender doing this to get into character. The man’s recent body of work is quite remarkable considering his popularity; he’ll wear a paper head in a small indie project like Frank, play a despicable slave owner in Oscar bait drama 12 Years A Slave (a performance worthy of a better film in my opinion), take chances with fellow A-listers in The Counselor, and add much needed gravitas to what could easily have been comic book fodder with the last two X-Men films. If making blockbuster comic book films allows him to chooses smaller roles like Frank, then I’m all for his appearance in them.
Like its titular character, Frank is not without its problems and seems to go in search for a story at the wrong time when it was perfectly fine as it was. I do applaud the film quite a bit for not taking the obvious route and making the band into an overnight success at the festival, and the strength of this allows for perhaps the film’s most resonating scene, the final one which I won’t spoil here. This is what the director hopes you’ll be left thinking about as the credits roll, and for the most part he’s right.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Rohan Morbey – follow me on Twitter.
Originally published September 18, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
