Lenny Abrahamson (2014)
I spent most of Frank thinking I didn’t get it and I certainly didn’t get the references to real performers. Lenny Abrahamson’s film is dedicated to Chris Sievey, who died in 2010. According to Wikipedia:
‘Frank is a fictional story mostly inspired by Frank Sidebottom, the comic persona of Chris Sievey who is thought to have given his backing to the film before his death, but the plot was also inspired by other musicians like Daniel Johnston and Captain Beefheart. Jon Ronson, who co-wrote the film [with Peter Straughan], was part of Sidebottom’s band, and the plot began as an adaptation of his writings but later became a fictional take on it [sic].’
In the film, the deep-verging-on-mystical Frank is the front man of a rock group called the Soronprfbs. Their unpopularity, along with their unpronounceable name, is a badge of their artistic integrity. They go into creative purdah for a year in the Irish countryside to compose and record tracks for an album that no one is likely to buy: the rent on their cabin in the woods is paid from the nest egg of Jon, a chance, emergency newcomer to the band, who’s an aspiring songwriter. Jon gets involved when the current keyboards player tries to drown himself – unsuccessfully, but he has to spend a night in hospital and there’s a gig that evening. (While they’re putting the album together, the band’s manager, Don, does kill himself.) Jon starts posting videos of the Soronprfbs online: in spite of their lack of talent, the power of the internet and the unpredictability of public opinion combine to get the group attention and an invitation to the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas. The advent of what is, in their terms, conventional recognition and success brings about the band’s disintegration. The end of the film sees Frank and three of the others sort-of back together but with the sadly chastened Jon leaving them to it.
The mostly admiring reviews of Frank stress how brilliantly off the wall it is but – perhaps because it seems pleased with its ‘craziness’ – I found it monotonous and rather boring. (If you want something truly crazy but grippingly coherent, funny and dramatic, read Stephen Sharp’s first-person account of schizophrenia in the ‘Diary’ section of the latest LRB.) Frank is remarkable for the spheroidal papier mâché head the title character wears and for what Michael Fassbender manages to do while wearing it. The head looks to be closely modelled on the one that Chris Sievey/Frank Sidebottom wore in performance but the Frank of the film wears it all the time. (He also carries a spare, in which Don commits suicide.) Photographs or replicas of the head are ubiquitous in the Curzon cinemas where Frank is showing and it may help the film to be a box-office hit (although we were two of only five people in Curzon Richmond for the late afternoon show yesterday). The head certainly goes some way beyond gimmickry. The clever camera angles manage to vary its look without (as far as I could see) actual changes being made to its features. And thanks to the way Michael Fassbender reads his lines – these include descriptions of Frank’s facial expressions under the head – and moves his body, the character has expressive range.
Jon – Jon Ronson’s alter ego? – is English; Frank, Don and the band’s ball-breaker theremin player Clara are American; the other two Soronprfbs are French. Domhnall Gleeson does well enough as Jon: you sense that the thinness of the role is tempting Gleeson to send the character up but this isn’t the problem it would have been with a less naturally likeable actor in the part. I was sorry when Scoot McNairy’s Don took his own life: McNairy manages to suggest a convincingly unstable personality. Maggie Gyllenhaal isn’t given nearly enough to do in the repetitive role of Clara – she does plenty more than the script deserves. Her height gives Clara a double hauteur and, when the Soronprfbs have fallen apart and Clara is singing in a bar with the group’s remnants, the bassist (François Civil) and drummer (Carla Azar), Gyllenhaal’s slow, solemn renderings of ‘On Top Of Old Smokey’ and Erika Eigen’s ‘I Wanna Marry A Lighthouse Keeper’ (the first time I’ve heard it outside A Clockwork Orange) made me smile. Most of the pleasure I got from Frank was in the closing stages – Gyllenhaal’s singing, Michael Fassbender without the head (he makes Frank’s actual face another mask) and Tess Harper’s brief appearance as his mother. After playing the woman who brought Jesse Pinkman into the world in Breaking Bad, Tess Harper seems to be cornering the market in nice conventional moms with engaging but problematic sons.
14 May 2014
