'Uncle Frank' marks the return to feature filmmaking after a long hiatus for Alan Ball, the innovative showrunner behind TV's SixFeetUnder and TrueBlood. Read the review: Sundance
, a comedy-drama road movie set in the 1970s about a gay man confronting his past, as a triumphant return to the feature format but, sadly, the result is a hot mess. Although clearly made with earnest good intentions, this shabbily constructed work feels way too thirsty for audience love as it strings together a series of life-affirming, message-laden and sometimes embarrassingly anachronistic moments that feel too unconnected to satisfy as a drama.
Bookish, academically minded Betty doesn't feel like she really fits in with this if not redneck then at least pinkish-necked horde. Only her elegant bachelor uncle Frank , a literature professor at New York University, seems to get her, and tells her she can reinvent herself into anything she wants to be, or some kind of bumper sticker slogan like that.
This new information has only started to sink in for Beth when the phone goes and her grandmother Mammaw Bledsoe calls in tears to announce that Daddy Mac has gone up to the big barcalounger in the sky. Frank and Beth set off on a long drive for the funeral, secretly followed, it later transpires, by Wally, who insists he's stalked them because Frank will need him for emotional support on the trip and not because he's controlling or anything.
As the film works towards a contrived climax, many viewers may find themselves moved by Frank's tortured, internalized self-hatred, which Bettany really milks in a graveside crying jag, and by Wally's cloyingly underscored good-heartedness. That's made all the more noble given he can never come out to his own family because men are killed for that in Saudi Arabia . But the script's virtue-signaling is ham-handedly executed, and not just in relation to the gay characters.
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