Review: Home Video
Frank | Lenny Abrahamson | UK & Ireland | 2014 | 95 min
Amazon Instant
Frank delivers subtle laughs and quiet observations about the nature of masks, the creative process, fame, and social media. Michael Fassbender shows us a side we haven’t seen before—from behind a papier-mâché mask. And it is always fun to watch a crazy Maggie Gyllenhaal rocking on a Theramin.
My parents watched Frank about a week ago and immediately after they finished they called me and told me I needed to watch it. It didn’t take long to convince me, they hooked me when they called it ‘unique.’ They said it was different from what they normally watched and not at all what they had expected. Within an hour, I was sitting in front of the TV watching it myself. Frank has a charming, offbeat quality that made me both laugh and feel for the characters.
Frank has a fairly simple premise. Jon (Domnhall Gleeson), a young man in a small Irish town, is desperate to be a songwriter. Jon comes across a man trying to drown himself, who happens to be they keyboardist for a touring band, “Soronprfbs.” The band invites Jon to play their gig in his town that night, and he quickly decides to join them. At that first gig, Jon discovers that the lead signer, Frank (Michael Fassbinder) wears a large papier-mâché mask—on and off stage. Slowly Jon learns the eccentric qualities of each band member when they go to a secluded cabin to record an album. What was supposed to be a weekend away from his dull office job turns into an 11-month session. While there, Jon takes videos of the band and shares them, along with quirky anecdotes, on various social media outlets. Eventually this exposure gets them a gig at South by Southwest and this gig tests the stability of the group.
Frank starts out really funny and ends a little serious. The humor is refreshingly silly while being realistic and not overly crude. The film plays with the idea that masks hide emotions. It is never clear what is going on in Frank’s head, and this keeps the audience on the edge of their seats. After being in the cabin for months, Jon finally writes a song that he thinks is brilliant, and he goes to Frank to play it for him. When he finishes playing, there is a pause where Frank stands silently. The song is unimaginative and sounds exactly like what he had been writing the whole movie, but by this point Frank and Jon had gotten fairly close. How he responds to the song reflects his feelings for Jon and foreshadows where their relationship will go. But the mask allows the film to withhold Frank’s response in order to force the audience to wait in anticipation. The audience waits while only having Frank’s emotionless beady eyes to look at.
While a work of fiction, Frank is inspired by the late Chris Sievey, who toured as “Frank Sidebottom”; the screenplay was co-written by Jon Ronson, who toured with Sievey. Though offbeat and unique, the story of Frank is actually fairly realistic and although the characters are all somewhat unstable, their actions are very natural and relatable. This is even true for the main character, Jon, who I didn’t especially like since he acted selfishly and seemingly sneaky. The film opens with him trying to find inspiration for a song, and like so many of us have experienced, he starts making up these uninspiring songs about whatever he sees around him, like about a lady in a blue coat with a bag. Jon’s use of social media is typical nowadays as a way to aspire to fame, but the film also demonstrated the shortcomings of Twitter and YouTube. However, I found the constant Twitter pop-ups to be distracting and overt product placement.
Michael Fassbender was awesome. Someone with his star power usually wouldn’t be chosen to be covered up for an entire movie, but Fassbender uses this role to demonstrate another dimension of his acting that wasn’t seen in Shame or Prometheus. He abandons any macho qualities that were so prevalent in his earlier films and instead embraces Frank’s openness and silliness. This is immediately obvious when we first see him perform; the sounds he makes are off the wall and his body moves like a modern dancer. I also enjoyed Maggie Gyllenhaal who is great at acting a little crazy. Her character plays the theramin in the band, and as a devoted admirer of Frank she will do whatever she believes is best for him. She’ll even stab Jon if she has to.