What to say about Frank? Knowing nothing of the source
(Chris Sievey’s comic musician/presenter Frank Sidebottom) makes Lenny
Abrahamson’s Frank a curious animal
to dissect. Reassuringly, for a film about a man wearing a giant fake head,
Abrahamson immediately engages the audience through Domhnall Gleeson’s Jon. The
film opens with Jon, an aspiring musician stuck in a rut, desperately trying to
create a song about ‘life’, forcing terrible lyrics forged from whatever he
sees into cheesy melodies. It’s funny, relatable and smart; it’s the start a
film like this needs, as before we even meet Frank, we’re in.
The rest of the film
takes us on a journey from middle Britain to the SXSW festival in Texas and
with the exception of Jon the rest of the characters are at first comically
crazy and later, melancholically crazy. These characters don’t really change,
but we change around them and this is something impressive and really only
evident after the film’s end. Jon, our way in, does change and his arc evolves
organically. How we as an audience respond to these characters is a sign of
sophisticated storytelling. Within the film, the characters don’t seem to care
whether we engage with them or not and this unusual discourse adds to the
surrealism of the film.
Ultimately, what we
have here is a film about embracing life and Abrahamson forces us to judge his
characters for doing just that. We judge them for being abstract thinkers, for
being unusual and living outside societal rules and like Jon, when the film
ends we realise our error, we feel worse than when we started, but we learnt a
valuable lesson. Jon starts by trying to write about life and ends learning more
about it than he imagined. Frank is a
special piece of filmmaking.
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