“I LOVE MY DAD” My rating: B- (Glenwood Arts)
96 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Is “I Love My Dad” clever/charming or just plain creepy?
Reactions will run the gamut for filmmaker James Morosini’s second feature, an autobiographical slice of parent/child dysfunction that flits nervously between comedy and tragedy.
Middle aged Chuck (Patton Oswalt) has proven such a disappointment to his estranged teenage son Franklin (writer/director Morosini) that the kid has severed all lines of communication.
Chuck lives hundreds of miles from his son and ex-wife (Amy Landecker) and has missed most of Franklin’s adolescence, including the boy’s recent stint with a support group for high schoolers with suicidal tendencies.
Franklin, you see, is an emotional mess and for this he blames good old Dad, a font of moral bankruptcy and selfishness.
But Chuck now finds himself desperately looking for connections with the child he’s pretty much ignored, and he comes up with a mind-bogglingly inappropriate scheme.
He’ll catfish Franklin by creating an online presence, disguising himself as a teenage girl who will exhibit a romantic interest in the lonely kid. That way he can pry into Franklin’s life in the guise of another teen.
Remember, Franklin has been undergoing counseling for suicidal thoughts. What could go wrong?
Chuck uses as his model the cute young waitress (Claudia Sulewski) who serves him breakfast at his local diner. Without her permission he raids her online accounts, downloading her collection of selfies and building a fictional profile.
Morosini’s screenplay (it won the 2020 Screencraft competition) makes a big leap when it employs fantasy sequences to depict encounters between Franklin and his dream girl. In reality they’re simply typing back and forth on their computer keyboards, but in Franklin’s mind this beautiful, funny, charming woman is right there in front of him, waiting to be kissed.
For his part, Chuck must keep scrambling to answer Franklin’s demands for a real honest-to-God telephone conversation with his long-distance paramour. He recruits the help of his bed buddy and boss (Rachel Dratch) who immediately screws everything up by agreeing to a face-to-face meeting.
Despite some overtly comic moments, the mood of “I Love My Dad” is one of every-growing anxiety. After all, Franklin is a fragile young man, and Morosini’s screenplay keeps digging an ever-deeper hole that will make his rude awakening to the truth all that more traumatic.
Saving the day (because I’m not sure I buy the “happy” ending Morosini supplies) are the performances.
Oswalt is of course a great funnyman, but in recent years he’s successfully made the jump to dramatic roles; here he balances parental angst with an almost childlike eagerness to love and be loved.
Director Morosini radiates bruised soulfulness as Franklin and, despite being 31 years old when he shot the film, makes us believe he’s a teen.
And Sulewski — making her acting debut after a successful career as a YouTube and Instagram influencer — is dynamite in dual roles, both as the luscious “dream” girl and as the down-to-earth real-life waitress.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 