Review: Strong performances can’t redeem Alan Ball’s heavy-handed ‘Uncle Frank’
LA Times“You’re gonna be the person you decide to be, or you’re gonna be the person everyone tells you you are. You get to choose.” So says Frank Bledsoe, a closeted gay NYU professor and recovering alcoholic who will struggle to live up to those words spoken to his adoring 14-year-old niece Beth at the start of “Uncle Frank,” a finely acted, often deeply emotional period piece that, despite its share of strong moments, stacks the deck too much for its own dramatic good. A 1969-set prologue introduces us to Frank’s noisy South Carolina family during a birthday party for his monstrous, simmeringly homophobic father, Daddy Mac. Beth takes the news in relative stride — perhaps relating to Frank’s “outsider” status and the “sophistication” it implies — and promises not to breathe a word to the folks back home who’ve been led to believe Frank has a longtime girlfriend. Also at issue: Frank, despite his decency, wisdom and elevated sensibilities, is such a troublingly self-hating gay man he could have dropped in from a rehearsal of “The Boys in the Band.” Add to that his teetering sobriety, irrevocably haunting memories of a teen-years tragedy, plus an inability to embrace the hovering Wally’s fulsome love and the scales can’t help but tip into melodrama.