FRANK: Something Perishable

Director: Lenny Abrahamson
Writers: Jon Ronson, Peter Straughan
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Domhnall Gleeson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Scoot McNairy, Francois Civil, Carla Azar
Runtime: 95 mins.
2014

You think you know Frank. Just as our protagonist makes the mistake of believe he understands Frank's potential, Frank's desires, and worst of all Frank himself, you begin watching this film with a sense of superiority--or at least a sense of superior perspective. As the film opens on a young man desperately seeking inspiration but only coming up with a few facile snippets of pop fancy, you understand exactly where this must be going. This story is a Kunstlerroman--the development to maturity of an artist--with zany indie trappings. When our protagonist Jon (Domnhall Gleeson) joins a strange band called the Soronprfbs that jars him out of his sense of normalcy, you predict that this band will be the key to unlocking his nascent potential.

You've made a mistake. You couldn't be more wrong.


Somewhat like Ed Wood before it, Frank is the anti-Kunstlerroman. The only artists that are made are those who already were. You think for a while that the first act of the film was tonally incoherent, but then you realize something. The first act of Frank is a Trojan horse, meant to fool its audience into a false sense of complacency. Then, from the innards of that mythological wooden beast springs a film that is far more disturbing, insightful, and daring than it had any right to be.

I hope the second person narrative of this blog post doesn't feel condescending, but I adopt it because a misunderstanding of the beginning is exactly how this film is supposed to be watched. The tone and structure are immaculately crafted to make it so. Everyone I've spoken to about Frank has said some variation of the following:

"I almost stopped watching after the first fifteen minutes."

"I didn't like where it was going so I turned it off."

"I only kept with it because you told me to."

The potential to alienate your audience with a misleading first act is a tremendous risk. Most films commit to striking a clear tone and create a familiar world from scene one, so the audience has something to latch on to. Those movies tend to make more money. You watch the first scene of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and you know exactly the sort of roller coaster ride you're signing up for. Frank shares characteristics with another of my favorite movies, The Cabin in the Woods: you watch the first scene feeling like you've seen this movie a hundred times before, when in fact you will soon discover that you have never seen anything like it in your life.

Frank is the nexus of three personal obsessions of mine, so I'll conduct this review by talking about each of them in turn. The first obsession is one that I have already referenced several times in this review: tonal shifts.

It's hard to define the tone of a movie in plain English (probably much easier in French...); unlike plot or mise en scene, you can't look at a tone or figure it out with a chart. Tone is a chameleon, often invisible, almost entirely contextual. It's like the air you breathe. You can't put your finger on it, though you feel it all around you, swirling, putting pressure on you, giving you life. Tone can be a warm blanket or a harsh ice storm. We take comfort in movies that telegraph exactly the sorts of things we can expect. We throw money at those movies and turn off our brains, or turn on our tear ducts, or put on our thinking caps accordingly.

Inconsistent tone is a hallmark of bad filmmaking. It gives you a sinking feeling: "Something is wrong here. She shouldn't be doing that. Why is there a dog all of a sudden? That was a cheap death." A good movie knows exactly what it is and hits that identity home in every single frame of its being. See John Wick for a master class in tonal coherence. See Star Wars. See most Spielberg for that matter. We love a strong tone.

That is exactly why deliberate jarring tonal shifts and inconsistencies are so exciting to me! I wrote a little bit about this in my post about The Place Beyond the Pines, and I'll quote a snippet here:

When I was very young, I would see the iconic imagery of Free Willy--you know the image, with Willy leaping over that little kid--and I would wish the movie would have the balls to let Willy's jump fall a bit short, crushing the boy and ending the movie with tragedy.

This was the beginning of my fascination with tonal shifts. Even at that ripe young age I could sense that movies tended to end as they were supposed to end, as established by the entire movie leading up to it. Why do they have to do that? I thought. Why don't any movies throw mind-blowing curveballs at the audience? I'm not even talking The Sixth Sense twists--that ending was very tonally consistent. Why not let crap that belongs in another movie bust in and muck things up? Wouldn't that be exciting? Wouldn't that just knock the audience's head off?

Over the years I've learned why that doesn't happen ($$$$$$), but I've also learned that if you watch long and far enough, you will find movies that play with the formula. Upset the established order. Experiment with audiences. Make plot and character combinations that we have never seen before.

Frank is just such a movie. It could have entirely adopted any one of its 3+ tones for the entirety of its runtime, and the result probably would have been pretty good. Talented people worked on this film, after all. But that's not what it did. Frank chose to use its formal experimentation to make a meta-commentary about the true nature of the plot and characters involved. It allows the film to walk a tightrope act that one of my friends aptly summarized with the following statement: "I've never seen a movie in which how much I hate the protagonist and how much I love the movie are so far apart."

This is next level filmmaking, and it alienates some people for understandable reasons. That being said, it may alienate fewer than expected.

That's partially owing to my second obsession: the music.

I won't belabor this point beyond mentioning that the music featured in this film is probably the best use of music in any movie I have ever seen. It's so integral to the plot, tone, and character development that it should probably be considered a character in its own right. Not even a static character, for that matter--a dynamic character that is constantly changing depending on what is required of it!

The most amazing thing about the soundtrack to me is the way it adapts itself so perfectly to the requirements of every scene, while never ceasing to be engaging. You have good music that a character thinks is good, bad music a character thinks is good, good music a character thinks is bad, bad music a character thinks is bad, music that two characters clearly have different opinions of, music that is striving, music that is thriving, music that is smothering in itself. Music that tears everybody apart. And perhaps most poignantly, music that brings a select group of people closer together.

This music somehow manages to be absolutely esoteric and absolutely entertaining at the same time. It manages to be beautifully composed and still feel like these characters are inventing it in the world of the film. It's like the holy grail of soundtrack composition. Damn it's good.

The last obsession of mine is Frank. Everything about Frank. Frank is a papier-mache god in a fleshy flabby world. The rest of the cast is great of course. Maggie Gyllenhaal is a blunt hammer hitting a blunt nail, Domnhall Gleeson is appropriately treacly, and Scoot McNairy is immensely dark and immensely likable. But the star is clearly Frank.

Two things in particular capture my imagination about Frank. The first is Michael Fassbender. In a lot of ways, this is a heavy bit of stunt casting. On paper you would anticipate a comedic actor for the role--someone who can play into the goofiness of the whole premise, really lay themselves out there. (I just got a horrid vision of a nightmare reality in which Adam Sandler played Frank...) Instead we get Fassbender, star of such deathly serious films as Hunger, Shame, A Dangerous Method, 12 Years a Slave. He is considered one of the great serious actors of our time. Even his turn as Magneto in First Class and Days of Future Past adds a considerable amount of gravitas to those films--more than they can handle. So why put Fassbender in a funny head and have him caper about and make a fool of himself?

Precisely because Fassbender is not a fool. Fassbender's Frank is goofy, but always towards a greater purpose. His antics don't feel like antics--they feel like deep, honest personal expressions emanating from a twisted mind. Frank is so funny precisely because Fassbender doesn't camp it up. His performance, much like the soundtrack, is one of the key bridges that makes the movie's tonal shifts work. We believe Frank as zany comic relief, and we believe him as tormented loner, and we believe him as psychotic man-child. The performance has so many layers peeling from that onion shell of a head.

My other favorite thing about Frank is that head. The head! It's so evocative! Masks and masked theatre are yet another personal obsession of mine. I've performed in mask twice-ish, and both experiences have changed my perception of what performance can be.

I could go on and on about masks, their roles, their difficulties, and their benefits, but suffice it to say that as far as Frank goes, having Fassbender's main acting tool--his face--completely covered does not inhibit him in any way. He gives an absolutely flawless masked performance, letting his physicality wake up big time. Just look at any of the screenshots in this post. Such precise embodied choices at every moment! It's exactly because of this that Frank never feels like a gimmick, or a ploy, or a sideshow. He feels like a person.



So rarely do we have the experience of a movie surpassing our expectations in every way. Frank slides past our expectations in its papier-mache horse head, setting up camp in our hearts and minds. Not everyone is going to react well to the playfulness of the film, especially when that playfulness leads it into dark subconscious spaces. But I love it so much I want to show it to all my hypothetical children.

4.5 / 5  BLOBS