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.)