DEAR FRANKIE — CANNES 2004

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Miramax Tearjerker Sees the Light of Day

Debut director Shona Auerbach’s touching story of a single mother and her hearing- impaired son was a charmer at the Cannes Film Festival but got caught in a release date abyss prolonged by the split between Miramax and Disney.

The supremely understated Emily Mortimer ("Notting Hill") plays a single mother who must constantly change her address in order to avoid an abusive ex-husband who stalks her.

But Lizzie’s most immediate concern rests with providing hope for her deaf son Frankie (Jake McElhone) by fueling a white lie about his dad being a crewman on a cargo ship sailing around the world.

Lizzie ghostwrites letters from Frankie’s ideal dad until the ship that he supposedly sails on docks in Glasgow harbor. Lizzie hires a stranger (Gerard Butler) to meet Frankie and pose as his father.

Although the story is objectively fraught with sentimental pitfalls, Auerbach's distinctively talented cast embody the characters with a guileless purity that puts nuance where you’d commonly see glad-handed self reference.

Shona Auerbach is a former still photographer. She brings a keen eye for the story’s working class Glasgow locations that have a timeless and rugged quality. When Frankie studies a global map, where he traces the routes that his dad’s ship follows, we appreciate the child's need to imbue the outside world with an intimate knowledge that however real or imagined serves a practical purpose of maintaining an important bond with his mother.

These aren’t people who verbally profess their love, but rather consistently commit to actions that speak for themselves. There is something tragically tender about a mother ghost-writing letters to her son in order to protect him from a truth she knows she must eventually reconcile.

Frankie befriends a contentious classmate named Ricky and invites him into his humble apartment. Ricky soon seizes on information he gleans there to bait Frankie. Ricky notices a newspaper article reporting the ship Frankie’s father is sailing on has arrived in Glasgow’s port. Ricky bets with Frankie that Frankie’s father won’t attend their Saturday soccer game.

The emotional shades of the story take on special depth as Lizzie relies on her friend Marie (Sharon Small), who works as a cashier at the local fish market, to help her find a man to serve as a proxy dad to Frankie for a day. Lizzie is careful to make clear to Butler's nameless character that this is strictly a business deal.

Frankie begins to play his own hand at protecting his mother. We’re never quite sure about how much Frankie suspects that the man isn’t really his father, but we see his buoyant efforts to fully enjoy the opportunity afforded him. Jake McElhone gives a brilliant performance as a child actor that speaks volumes. The portrayal invariably gives voice to aspects of his mother’s latent desires and to those of the man she hires to give physical form to her idea of essential recognition.

Frankie’s hearing loss is an aftereffect of abuse he suffered as a baby from his biological father. For Lizzie the disability is a daily reminder of the danger that men pose. But it’s also a character trait of her son that causes her to paint an ideal portrait of what Frankie’s father should be.

There’s an instinctual therapy at work in Lizzie’s actions toward her son, and he in turn responds instinctively to fulfill his part of her projected desires. "Dear Frankie" is a movie that carefully exposes the universal onion layers of a unique familial bond without ever leaving fingerprints on the layers. There’s a lot to enjoy in this sophisticated romantic drama.

Rated PG-13. 102 mins.