Watching the trailer for the new film, Being Frank, it seems like a high-concept comedy. Comedian Jim Gaffigan stars as Frank, whose life is thrown into disarray when his son, Phillip (Logan Miller), discovers he’s got a second family in a nearby town. With their relationship already strained, Phillip decides to blackmail his father into letting him attend NYU in the fall and decides to spend his spring break getting to know the other family. It’s a set up ripe for shenanigans and near-misses and while the film features plenty of those, it’s ultimately a more thoughtful examination of how a father’s behavior influences each member of his family.
Much of that work is done through Frank and Phillip’s relationship. Theirs and the film’s first scene finds them in a mock interview. It’s already an act of unnecessary act of sadism, but we don’t realize just how much until Phillip’s mother, Laura (Anna Gunn), points out that Phillip probably shouldn’t even need an interview to work at the ketchup factory Frank owns. There and throughout, it’s clear how disappointed Frank is in Phillip and how that’s made Phillip hate him in return. Given that, when Phillip first finds out, it’s fun to watch him make Frank sweat.
That starts when Frank walks in on his second family’s home and finds Phillip, who Frank has previously talked about as the son of his “friend“ Richie, sitting on the couch. Though the beer he drops on the floor perhaps puts too fine a point on his shock, the slack-jawed look of disbelief and the way Frank’s speech slurs as he tries to catch up to the situation are really effective choices. As Frank quickly adjusts to the new status quo, it’s both impressive and chilling to see the way Gaffigan makes Frank almost likable.
The first time he speaks to Phillip alone, he’s as cruel and condescending as he was in that opening scene, but as Phillip tells the second family how horrible his father is and expresses how Frank’s behavior affected him, watching Frank question whether he’s pulled off his double life as easily as he thinks and actively work to repair his relationship with Phillip makes it easy to forget what a lying sociopath he must be. Indeed, in the scene where he tells Phillip how he ended up with two families, Gaffigan is so believable that you almost buy that it “just happened.”
That said, writer Glen Lakin and the strong supporting cast never let the audience forget the way Frank’s inability to be fully emotionally available for either family has affected them. Whether it’s the years of quiet dissatisfaction Gunn projects or the way the other son, Eddie (Gage Banister) says he doesn’t even know what makes him happy anymore because he’s only ever done what his father asks, it’s hard to buy into Frank’s fantasy. However, while each character gets a scene to air their grievances, where Being Frank suffers is not being able to dig into any of those characters except Phillip.
Perhaps most uneven is the daughter in the second family, Kelly (Isabelle Phillips). For a preternaturally confident 17-year-old girl, it’s hard to believe she would be attracted to Phillip and the justification she gives–that liking him is the only thing her father has ever her forbade her from doing–is far less interesting than the subtle suggestion that they get along because they’re two sides of the same coin.
Though Being Frank plays with some intriguing ideas, there are simply too many at work for it to do them justice in under two hours. Rather, the film spends so much time working out the logistics of how Frank has maintained two families and what he and Phillip do to maintain that lie that each family member gets little more than a single scene to express how Frank has failed them. Still, while Being Frank ultimately suffocates under the weight of its own premise, the solid cast of performers and clever if slight character work make it worth watching—even if it’s a little less fun than expected.
