Uncle Frank: One of the year's best

Uncle Frank (2020) • View trailer

4.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity, sexual candor and drug use

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.27.20 

I haven’t been this nervous since Anne Hathaway reached for the microphone, in 2008’s Rachel Getting Married.

 

Although she has adored him her entire life, Beth (Sophia Lillis) begins to realize that
there's a lot more to her Uncle Frank (Paul Bettany) than he reveals to most people.

Writer/director Alan Ball’s Uncle Frank — an Amazon Prime original — is a deeply personal and sensitively handled character study, brought to life by an excellent ensemble cast headed by Paul Bettany, Sophia Lillis and Peter Macdissi. Ball deftly walks the razor’s edge that often separates comedy from tragedy, delicately developing circumstances that set up a third-act revelation/confrontation that raises our anxiety to the screaming level.

 

We know an emotional train wreck is coming.

 

A lengthy prologue — set in 1969, in tiny Creekville, S.C. — introduces the Bledsoe clan during a rowdy birthday party for elderly patriarch Daddy Mac (Stephen Root). Three generations are present: Daddy Mac, his wife Mammaw (Margo Martindale) and Aunt Butch (Lois Smith); adult children Frank (Bettany), Neva (Jane McNeill) and Mike (Steve Zahn); the latter two’s respective spouses, Beau (Burgess Jenkins) and Kitty (Judy Greer); and a rambunctious passel of grandkids.

 

Fourteen-year-old Beth (Lillis) stands out as a quiet observer, keenly attuned to the moods of others. Alas, she isn’t quick enough to prevent an irate Daddy Mac from explosively chewing out the younger kids: an eyebrow-raising moment that reveals a truly nasty temper.

 

We also don’t notice Frank right away; like Beth, he seems somehow removed from the noisy celebration. The exchange of gifts reveals a guarded dynamic between Frank and his unpleasant father. We assume it’s the former’s outsider status; unlike everybody else in the room, Frank long ago left Creekville for the Big Apple, where he has become a revered literature professor at New York University (NYU).

 

Frank escaped the vicious cycle of high school pregnancies that trap Creekville 16-year-olds into a lifetime of drudge jobs: a fate he hopes Beth also can avoid. He’s her favorite adult: the only one who treats her like a person, and not a child, listening attentively to her every word. But she fears her limited options, given family circumstances.

 

Don’t settle for who people expect you to become, he advises; become who you want to be.

 

That sentiment caps an achingly sweet and poignant chat on the porch, an entire world removed from the noisy clan on the other side of the wall: staged by Ball with carefully nuanced sensitivity, and delivered with touching persuasiveness by Bettany and Lillis.

 

This film is bookended by an older Beth’s off-camera narration, much in the manner of the adult Scout, in 1962’s To Kill a Mockingbird. (A bit later, Ball cheekily has Beth admit that Harper Lee is one of her favorite authors.)

 

Flash-forward four years. Beth has become a freshman at NYU, excited both by a wide-open future, and this proximity to her beloved Uncle Frank. She is, nonetheless, an adorably naïve product of her conservative upbringing.

 

A few typical rites of passage into her first semester, she discovers — during a bohemian evening — that Frank is gay, and has long shared an apartment with his partner Walid “Wally” Nadeem (Macdissi): not merely another gay man, but a Saudi Arabian.

 

Lillis established her talent for wide-eyed astonishment as Beverly Marsh in the recent It two-parter; it serves her equally well here. Although such a revelation is utterly beyond Beth’s ken, her bewilderment does not include judgment; she’s simply insatiably curious. And it’s impossible to resist Wally’s good-natured charm and genuine delight at meeting the niece who is the apple of Frank’s eye.

 

While still trying to process all of this, a crisis: Daddy Mac has died suddenly, and Frank and Beth must return to Creekville. Kitty, apparently terrified of airplanes, doesn’t want her daughter to fly; Frank therefore agrees to drive them both. Beth is delighted, as she’ll have a chance to get to know her uncle better; she has so many questions.

 

It soon becomes clear, however, that Frank’s discomfort over this road trip has deeper roots than (we now understand) a sense that he doesn’t belong.

 

Bettany, a long-undervalued actor of transcendent talent, gives a phenomenally layered performance. Frank has, in effect, been giving a performance his entire life. In New York, or when around Beth, he’s a kind-hearted intellectual — but absolutely never snooty about it — keenly attuned to people and his environment. Out of his comfort zone, though, Bettany allows the man’s deeply buried anxiety and despair to surface.

 

The closer they get to Creekville, the more apprehensive Frank becomes, as if he somehow knows this will be far more than a funeral.

 

Beth’s sudden (and unexpected) slide into adulthood is fun to watch, and not merely for the way her appearance and clothing gradually become more hip (kudos to costume designer Megan Stark Evans). Lillis makes her progressively more spunky and saucy, culminating in a riposte to a clumsy pick-up attempt by a young garage mechanic: absolutely the best, funniest — and wincingly on-target — put-down I’ve ever heard. (Ball should get an Oscar for those few lines alone.)

 

Macdissi is a similar revelation. Wally is the soothing, restorative balm to Frank’s edgy, angst-ridden intellectual. Macdissi also is quite funny; Wally’s shrewd observations are always dead-on, and his bluntness — never unkind — invariably softens a tense moment. Wally also radiates devoted love: Frank is his entire world, and there’s no question that Frank needs him equally.

 

The supporting cast is a well-established collection of scene-stealers. Martindale has cornered the market on no-nonsense matriarchs, and her Southern-fried sensibilities here are to die for. Zahn makes excellent use of his slow-burn double-takes; we sense that Mike is always one or two pages behind, in life’s complex script. Greer’s Kitty is sweet but slightly ditzy; Smith’s austere Aunt Butch seems to date back to the Civil War.

 

I wish Ball had spent more time with McNeill’s Neva; she proves to be an important character, and deserves more exposure, early on.

 

Cole Doman is exquisitely shaded as Frank’s teenage self, during flashback sequences.

 

Darcy C. Scanlin’s production design feels completely authentic, from the comfortably disheveled appearance of the Bledsoe family home, to the scholarly NYU atmosphere and early 1970s vibe of post-Stonewall New York City. Nathan Barr’s quietly poignant score is augmented by a wealth of period pop tunes that further establish the setting: from The Isley Brothers’ “It’s Your Thing” and Bobby Sykes’ “Feet Get Me Out of Here,” to Paul Frederick’s “Cool Blue” and Apollo 100’s switched-on take on Bach’s “Joy.”

Ball builds his film to a powerful conclusion, and I’ll warrant there won’t be a dry eye in the house. This is one for the ages.