Aubrey MaloneA film to make you sit up and think
Frank (15A)
When a film begins by being weird, its continued weirdness then becomes normal. So it is with Frank. We sink ourselves under its lunacy because it’s done so convincingly. We accept the fact that a singer can live with a fake head on top of his shoulders and that none of his colleagues will pass a blind bit of notice of it.
In fact it’s only when the head comes off towards the end that Frank’s character loses his power. It’s a bit like Zorro or Batman without their masks. The spell becomes broken.
Domhnall Gleeson (Brendan’s son in real life) plays Jon, a nerdy keyboard player and ‘wannabe’ songwriter who’s co-opted into a pop band when their own keyboard player tries to drown himself. He becomes part and parcel of their offbeat set-up in no time, leaving his boring desk job to ‘join the circus’, as it were.
They move from Britain to Ireland and start recording a debut album in a deserted cottage by a lake. The music is terrible but nobody seems to notice, or care. Jon believes in it so much he even sacrifices a family inheritance to finance the band when they go broke.
They become a YouTube sensation thanks to Jon’s tweets. Here the film loses its balance a bit, mixing up its ‘getting back to nature’ aspirations with a momentary concession to technology. (At times one is tempted to think of it as a kind of E.T. for the dot.com generation.)
Adult fairy tale
The central focus, of course, is Frank himself, played by the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender. He never drops his immersion in the role and gives a fine performance as a character loosely based on a singer called Frank Sidebottom, who did indeed wear a fibreglass head.
But the film won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. If you don’t like the work of people like Tim Burton and Wes Anderson (whom Lenny Abrahamson, the director, resembles here) you may well think it’s a load of cobblers.
The secret is to accept it on its own terms as a kind of adult fairy tale. The music industry is nuts anyway, we’re told, so maybe it isn’t all that strange that the selection of odd bods we get here – most of them initially aggressive to Jon apart from the psychiatrically disturbed manager, Don – behave as if they’re in some kind of space capsule, blithely oblivious to the world the rest of us mortals inhabit.
Perhaps in time Frank will become a cult figure (like E.T.) and will be on cornflakes packets and key-rings and fridge magnets. Or maybe the film will just slip into the slot occupied by other ‘indie’ film-makers and be seen as an exotic side salad to the main dish of American commercialism.
Either way it will make you sit up and think. I would have preferred if Frank kept his false head on throughout, as I say, because Fassbender looks far too normal for such a delightfully abnormal film as this.
But having said that, the last scene – in which another odd band member, Maggie Gyllenhaal, also sings hauntingly – is truly beautiful and totally in sync with the wackily surreal edge of the foregoing.
*** Good