Alan Ball | Uncle Frank / 2020

all in the family

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alan Ball (screenwriter and director) Uncle Frank / 2020

 

If one might briefly ponder how the seemingly well-adjusted and young figures I described in the last two films in this larger essay were also suffering from denial and delusion, in Alan Ball’s Uncle Frank, set in the early 1970s alternately in the homophobic Creekville, South Carolina and gay-friendly Manhattan, the audience can easily comprehend why Frank Bledsoe (Paul Bettany) might wish to deny his sexuality to his unfriendly family. On his few holiday visits back home, he is treated to lectures about his unmarried status by Aunt Butch (Lois Smith), recriminating smiles and kisses by his Mammaw Bledsoe (Margo Martindale), and complete dismissal by his father, Daddy Mac (Stephen Root). This is a world in which any marriage and the “no-neck” bastards it produces are awarded with family love and acceptance, even if that marriage might have occurred, as the old-timers used to say, “under the gun,” as is the case with Frank’s younger brother, Mike (Steve Zahn, the lead of Cowboys) and his wife Kitty (Judy Greer).

    The only pleasure that Frank enjoys in this Southern outpost is his conversations with his niece Beth (Sophia Lillis), a budding Carson McCullers—one of Beth’s favorite authors—who takes her uncle’s advice that she should be what she wants to be instead of how others might wish to define, to heart.

   Given what we gradually also come to perceive—that Frank as a child (a role played by Cole Doman), having fallen in love with a neighbor boy, Sam (Michael Perez), was terrorized by the hell-and-damnation lectures of his father and abandoned Sam, who in response drowned himself—it is little wonder that Frank still has delusions regarding his family’s ability to show him love which effects the way he sees himself as an adult.

      In Manhattan, Frank lives an open sexual life as a popular New York University literature professor along with his Saudi-born husband, Walid “Wally” Nadeem (Peter Macdissi), who, despite the fact that if he were to reveal his sexuality to his mother he might be beheaded, is a kind of wildly open gay man, not at all intimidated to cover up his sometimes campy behavior.

       A bit like Michael in Eytan Fox’s Sublet, the New York City version of Frank seems to have it all: a fulfilling job and loving companion. If only his past family life can stay safely put in the world he has successfully, it appears, left behind.

      But we all know that even if you “can’t go home again,” that home has a way of following you to wherever else you may have escaped. In Frank’s case it begins with the sudden appearance of his niece Beth, who is now a freshman at NYU, with her new boyfriend. As Abbey White nicely describes the it in The Hollywood Reporter, encountering the fairly swishy Walid at the door “the young girl who says she's ‘never known anybody who's gay before’ soon discovers that she has actually has, both in her beloved uncle and even more shockingly, her church choir director,” as well, we might add, her boyfriend, who has wheedled his way into the party simply to proposition the esteemed professor.

     Suddenly realizing that she is completely out of her league, Beth swallows down some whisky, and under the delighted tutelage of Wally, attempts to assimilate her new environment. Yet hardly does she catch her breath after all her new discoveries, but she, along with Frank, are called back home through a phone call announcing the death of the mean-hearted Daddy Mac. Beth has no choice but to return, but Frank attempts to talk his way out of it.

       Wally will hear nothing of it, and argues that instead of taking a plane or train, they drive down to South Carolina by car, with him in the back seat. If we can’t quite yet comprehend why Wally is so insistent that he join in the funeral “fun,” we do get clues in the fact that during his difficult times following the death of his father, Frank was there to support him; and, more importantly, the fact that Frank is a former alcoholic who in revisiting the horrors of his childhood relationship with his father will need all the support he can get.

       Frank, terrified by the whole ordeal, quickly nixes Wally’s participation in what his husband is certain will be a gothic horror tale, but does agree that a road trip with his niece might be a solution that would help to prepare him for the confrontation.

       If we can now recognize this film as being concerned with more serious issues than the mental and sexual awakening of the young Beth, it is still also a comedy of sorts, exemplified by the sudden appearance of a beautiful convertible conveniently following Frank and his niece at a respectable distance that sports Wally at the wheel. Their attempts to cohabit a room at the Dixie-situated Hummingbird Hotel, along with various other on-the-road psychological insights and absurd tiffs offer some levity to what soon becomes a far darker work, particularly when the tag-along Wally discovers that Frank has taken up drinking again and has resumed his long-ago habit of hiding small single-swallow bourbon bottles around the bedroom. When Frank and Beth’s car breaks down, forcing them to join Wally in his olive-green and white rented Cadillac, Beth gets a far more intimate and disturbing view of what her uncle’s life is all about.

      Ball might have presented the final events as a simple endurance test in how to smile and keep every emotion hidden within except for the fact that after the funeral a lawyer shows up to read Daddy Mac’s will. The family members are each left some small amounts—except for Frank whom his father “outs” in front of the entire family in this most egregious manner imaginable.

      Frank goes rushing off, and Beth, now knowing of the dangers facing him, quickly borrows her father’s car and speeds away to Wally for help. Wally knows where he may have headed—to the pier from where Frank’s boyhood friend dived into the waters—and Beth knows the territory. Together they discover the car where Frank has left it, but after rushing to the pier see no sign of their loved one.

      We might imagine that Frank has drowned as well, but Ball has already signaled his intentions to turn this into a sort of sentimental feel-good tragic-comedy, and they soon discover him stumbling through the nearby woods.

      Embracing him with relief, Wally and Beth grab the slightly drunken Frank and race off to the more raucous after-funeral dinner, which is a time for celebration in such Protestant family gatherings. Finally, Frank’s delusions are shown up for what they truly are as one by one, family members respond with love and acceptance, seemingly even more receptive to Wally’s ability to share his open-minded attitude toward life in general. Even Aunt Butch gives the prodigal son a hug, although assuring him that we sill still go to hell when he dies.

     Ball’s work, particularly in the final reconciliation with a past that clearly tortured his father more than Frank himself, is not entirely believable and thus is not as profound as he intends it to be. But with Wally to guide him, Frank—and those of us who have shared his journey—can now. if nothing else, let out a hearty guffaw, particularly when Frank’s mother demands that Wally now call her Mammaw, a mother finally to whom he can now tell the truth without fear of death.

 

Los Angeles, October 27, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (October 2020).