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Frequency
7/10
USA
2000
director - Gregory Hoblit
script - Toby Emmerich
cinematographer - Alar Kivilo
stars - Dennis Quaid, Jim Caviezel
118 minutes
Frequency is really more a mechanism than an actual film, but it's
such a wonderfully effective little machine I don't think anybody will
mind very much.
The plot could easily have become tortuously over-complicated, and it's
difficult to summarise while at the same time doing justice to its multiple,
intertwined ingenuities. But here goes. Jim Caviezel plays New York cop
John Sullivan - it's October 1999 and unusually strong solar flares produce
spectacular northern lights over Manhattan. The northern lights are the
strongest for exactly 30 years - since the week John's father Frank (Quaid),
a fireman, was killed on the job while battling a warehouse inferno. John
stumbles across his father's old ham radio set stuck away under the stairs,
and finds that "the mother of all sunspots" is enabling him to speak with
his father, back in 1969. John's warnings lead Frank to avoid death in
the warehouse fire, which in turn leads to a rippling out of changes down
over the years and back to the present.
The results, while ingenious and never less than entertaining, are clearly
a long way from being 100% original. The basic set-up of a kid attempting
to speak with a deceased relative using ham radio, not to mention the
opening cosmic shots of the planet accompanied by radio stations and static,
are straight from the prologue to Contact. Once Caviezel accesses
and interfaces with past events, we're firmly into Back To The Future
territory, and then the introduction of a serial killer into the plot
carries with it echoes of the 1979 cult favourite Time After Time,
which had a time-travelling H G Wells (Malcolm McDowell) and Jack The
Ripper (David Warner) doing battle in contemporary Washington - films
like Frequency, of course, remind us that we have actually
invented time machines already, and we call them the movie camera and
projector.
Some reviewers of this film have also mentioned its similarity to certain
episodes of The Twilight Zone, but I think that parallel only goes
so far - that TV series usually delivered unpleasantly ironic surprises
to its protagonists, while Frequency represents more of a constant
(if jagged) movement towards an inevitable, uncomplicated happy ending.
It's a classic example of high concept Hollywood - a nifty idea, very
well executed.
Incidentally, I can't believe I've just typed the words "very well executed"
while reviewing a film directed by the man who unleashed the dreadful
Fallen on the world back in 1998. You wouldn't have thought it
was possible to make a dull film featuring both Donald Sutherland and
John Goodman, but Gregory Hoblit managed it and then some. A turgid potboiler
of demonic possession starring a particularly leaden Denzel Washington,
Hoblit buried whatever interest lay dormant in the script under a welter
of over-elaborate visuals - slow motion, weird filters, bizarre angles,
etc. There was only one interesting scene in the whole enterprise : the
demon in question passed from one host to the next by simple touch, and
was thus able to chase his one of his intended victims down a busy shopping
street without any single one of the hosts involved breaking out of a
medium-paced walk.
Frequency, I'm pleased to say, extends that kind of cleverness
over the course of a full-length feature, and if Hoblit hasn't quite managed
to settle his visual style down to an acceptable degree - there is still
an inordinate amount of slow-motion, with endless pivotal items falling
gradually to the floor - at least here it works to the ultimate benefit
of the material. One particular shot, a pull-back from New York to the
whole planet Earth at night, the Aurora Borealis flaring gracefully over
the pole, suggests that Hoblit may even have the makings of a real visual
stylist, not just a purveyor of stylish visuals.
I'd guess that Hoblit - who made his name withLA Law and NYPD
Blue, then went on to considerable box office and critical acclaim
with his debut feature Primal Fear - is more than usually reliant
on being provided with a decent script. That's certainly what's on offer
here, Toby Emmerich skilfully dovetailing the twin narratives towards
a satisfying convergence. Hoblit and Emmerich casually pull off the tricky
feat of switching between the two time periods, while also crafting a
thriller blending murder mystery and science-fiction elements. Each element
of the plot, and each element of the expanding past/present relationship,
is established before we extend just that little bit further on - so that
when the big dramatic showdown scene at the end produces the film's only
real special effect, it feels entirely natural and appropriate, given
what's gone before. The other neat element of the script is to do with
memory - as Caviezel interferes with the past he doesn't only change the
present, he also provides himself with a whole new set of memories, equal
but distinct from the ones he's been used to his whole life. The visual
version of this is Hoblit's frequent use of fast-cut montages, in which
individual features blur and become ambiguous - the film ends with one
such sequence of montaged memory, agreeably rough-edged, wobbly, subject
to further change.
But these technical feats aren't enough for Hoblit and Emmerich - they
feel the need to strive for a greater resonance. To this end, Frequency
goes overboard in its corny dramatisation of the myth of the American
Dad. As played by Quaid, Frank Sullivan is an ordinary joe who's also
a hero - in his firefighting job, and also in his domestic role. We see
him through Caviezel's eyes, and he becomes idealised as an impossibly
virtuous figure, a role model so daunting that his son diverts into an
alternative profession. As in so many American films, Dad-worship is tied
inextricably in with baseball, and Frequency relies heavily on
the sport - for plot development, iconography, and character development.
This all-American stuff is kept in reasonable check - until the final
moments, in which a cloyingly sentimental Garth Brooks song swells up
out of the soundtrack, threatening to undo much of the film's hard-earned
charm and efficiency.
It's at this late stage that Frequency's real paradox becomes apparent.
Though ostensibly a hymn to the possibilities of change, its message
is actually very conservative, very family values. Caviezel's meddling
is an attempt to avert undesirable change, and replace an undesirable
past and present with an ongoing version of his childhood's ideal status
quo - the whole thing can be read as John Sullivan's dream of wish-fulfilment.
But I, for one, was willing to forgive the movie its flaws, to a large
extent because of the big twist that enables the Garth Brooks moment to
take place. I wouldn't dream of telling what that twist is - all I'll
say is that it was entirely unexpected, but also, in retrospect, the only
possible ending this film could ever have had.
by Neil
Young
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