In 1999, John Sullivan (James Caviezel) , a 36
year old police detective, whose father Frank (Dennis Quaid), a fireman, had
perished in a fire thirty years before, continues to live in the family house
in Queens. One night, John's neighbor and buddy Gordy (Noah Emmerich)
resurrects an old amateur transmitter/receiver that had belonged to Frank and
reactivates it, with the unexpected result that John is suddenly placed in
contact with his father on the eve of the latter's fatal accident, courtesy of
sun storms that are also producing spectacular displays of the aurora
borealis--courtesy of computer graphics--just as they had at the same moment
in 1969. Such is the interesting premise of Frequency,
directed by Gregory Hoblit from a screenplay by Toby Emmerich, but sadly after
that point the film doesn't seem to have the least idea what to do with it. Things
become more complicated when John decides to save his father by warning him
about his impending demise, a good deed that unexpectedly precipitates the
death of John's mother at the hands of a serial killer with a thing for
nurses. From that point on, John and his father, staying in contact by means
of the magic radio, are on the track of the killer in two different time
frames, and the plot becomes highly convoluted leading to a dénouement that
is longer on action than logic. Although I have no intention of seeing the
film a second time, I do have the impression there are some real
questions left dangling after the final fade out--for example, why the
renegade cop and homicidal psychopath Jack Shepard (Shawn Doyle) has to be
disposed of in both past and present to eliminate him. The movie only gives a
fuzzy visual answer by showing the setting changing back and forth, and
indicating Shepard undergoing some morphic change in the present time as if he
were about to dissolve like the Wicked Witch at the end of The Wizard of Oz.
No one could be surprised that reviewers
hastened to compare Frequency to The
Sixth Sense. Not only are both films ghost stories, but the
tacit father and son relationship between Malcolm Crowe and Cole Sear in the
latter film is a counterpart to the explicit one between Frank and John in
Frequency. In fact, Frequency
is a far better motion picture and to its credit goes quite far beyond the
genteel Schadenfreude of The Sixth Sense.
But it has only performed modestly at the box office so far, and the reason, I
think, is not just that The Sixth Sense got there fustest with the
mostest. Probably Frequency's most basic weakness is the way it
erratically wobbles back and forth between the genres of inspirational fantasy
and horror, in a way guaranteed to perplex audiences about which direction the
movie is headed--assuming they can keep track of all plot twists. However, Frequency
works best when it sticks to being a horror film, and I think it would have
been a far more successful picture, commercially and artistically, if its
makers had skipped the inspirational theme altogether. Unlike The Sixth
Sense with its innocuous revenants, Frequency ventures into the
territory of traditional literary horror--and to a certain extent, science
fiction--when John begins to grasp the consequences of his decision to alter
the past, for example when he realizes his mother has died after he calls her
and gets a wrong number each time. (The scene, which takes place at night in
John's kitchen, is very effectively photographed in dark blues and blacks.) At
moments like this or the one in which John and Frank understand they are
talking to each other over the radio for the first time, the film reminded me
of parts of the great British supernatural thriller Dead of Night
(1945).
Yet Frequency even manages to undermine
its potential as an effective horror picture, owing to a relentlessly speeded
up, nervous visual style that relies upon some very jerky handheld camera
shots combined with a lot of fast cutting, sometimes making it look as hyped
up as Oliver Stone's Any
Given Sunday. After a shot of the sun's burning surface, Frequency
descends to earth with a pumped up to the max, in medias res opening which
shows Frank rushing to the scene of a potentially disastrous fire where he
proceeds to heroically save the day--and it hardly ever manages to momentarily
put on the brakes during the remainder of the action. Even one of Universal's
house directors working on a B horror film in the 1940's would have had the
sense to build some suspense with the discovery of the radio. But in Frequency
the gadget is no sooner discovered and turned on, than dad's voice begins to
burble out of the great beyond. The evidence of great
horror films from the past, however, demonstrates how much more powerful a
movie in this genre can be when the logic of a straightforward linear
narrative has to confront the illogical events occurring within the drama.
This is the strength of Dead of Night as well as that of the best Val
Lewton pictures such as Jacques Tourneur's The Cat People (1942) and The
Leopard Man (1943), and Mark Robson's The Seventh Victim (1943). Frequency
is too busy splattering the screen with effects like superimpositions,
subjective cuts, slow motion shots of objects descending to the floor, not to
mention restlessly crosscutting back and forth between past and present, to
bother with details like this, although details--much less than thrills, and
far less than gore--are what make up the core of a memorable horror show.
It would be difficult to positively dislike Frequency,
but the film's inability to consistently develop its interesting main
premise--the return of the dead to life by means of a radio--is fairly mind
boggling even given the rather shaky standards of screen dramaturgy in
Hollywood these days. In the first pace, the apparent return from the grave of
anyone, no matter how deeply loved in this life, could only be profoundly
unnerving to the person who experienced it. But John never shows any response
other than unadulterated joy when he finds himself conversing with his
presumably deceased parent. Secondly, the sensation of horror, of existential Angst,
that must necessarily accompany such an event, can only be doubled when the
person returning is a close family member. When this person is the hero's
father--is it necessary to recall Hamlet?--the meeting can only be that
much more intense. It is not necessary to have taken Freud 1A and to have
written a term paper on the Oedipus complex to know that father-son
relationships, even under the most favorable circumstances, are fraught with
emotional ambiguity, although not the slightest glimmer of this insight makes
its way into Frequency. Yet, strangely enough, the movie's glowing
description of John's reunion with his long lost father is contradicted by
what the movie shows elsewhere. Frank is extroverted and gregarious--as played
by Dennis Quaid, he seems not so much the prototype of a model father as the
prototypic image of an all-American male. His son, by contrast, is a loner who
breaks up with his girlfriend at the beginning of the movie and who seems
destined to live out his life in the shadow of his father's memory. Here
appearances count for more than Frequency's explicit testimonials to
filial devotion, since it would not be easy to imagine a more striking
contrast than that between Quaid's broad, smiling face, and fair features, and
James Caviezel's haunted looks, and darkly brooding features that recall those
of the young Montgomery Clift. (If anyone ever has the bright idea of remaking
Theodore Dreiser's American Tragedy as a movie, Cavaziel would make a
perfect Clyde Griffiths.) The differences in
personality signaled by these physical differences imply a far less than ideal
father-son relationship that the movie simply wants to sweep under the carpet.
I have an allergy to the inspirational fantasy
genre in which typically the souls of the departed or angelic emissaries or
other beneficent spirits return to lend a helping hand to erring mortals, but
until watching Frequency I did not imagine that it could be
degraded much beyond its already debilitated status. The most famous
example of this kind of scenario, Ferenc Molnar's Liliom, used by
Rogers and Hammerstein as the basis for the musical play Carousel, and
the subject of a far greater motion picture version directed by Frank Borzage
in 1930 (see below), might well be described as the exception that proves the rule since
in it the titular hero bungles his mission when he returns to Earth and is
last seen in the movie headed for the infernal regions. Unlike
other genres--the horror film being a prime example--that have seen great days in
the past and do not seem likely to revive in the future, I do not think the
inspirational fantasy in its more or less undiluted form was ever anything but contemptible. (The one
exception that occurs to me is William Dieterle's shamelessly arty Portrait
of Jenny [1948], based upon a novel by the now nearly forgotten Robert
Nathan, which does not so much depict the triumph of the soul over death as
the triumph of passion over all obstacles, an amour fou fueled
behind the scenes by David O. Selznick's infatuation with Jennifer Jones,
according to David Thomson.) Although I do not personally believe in the
afterlife, the immortality of the soul, or the return of the dead to life, I
would certainly admit that as questions these topics are open to serious
discussion. Nevertheless, both believers and non-believers might well agree
that attempts to transfer eschatology to celluloid are likely to be
artistically unsatisfying and philosophically repellent. Already the attempt
to render in human terms as a work of art what by definition lies outside of
human experience poses not a few difficulties--and the last time a great
artist succeeded in doing this, as far as I am concerned, was when Dante wrote
The Divine Comedy back in 1302-21. Where movies, in picking up on this
theme, do not prostitute a once great idea, they pander to the gullible public
that supports far more astrologers, diviners, and self-styled psychics in this
country today than ever flourished in ancient Egypt, Babylon, Rome, or the
Celestial Empire. Inspirational fantasies often use dubious theology or simply superstitious
fear as a motivation; in Frequency the motivation is baseball, mom,
apple pie, and the USA. At the end of the film, it turns out that all this
complicated machinery of rearranging the past has been brought into play so
that the Sullivan family will be reunited in the final reel. Ultimately
what Frequency has
to offer for its labors is a highly idealized picture of the American middle
class family as the Kingdom of Heaven--just as idealized and just as spurious
as its picture of father-son relationships.
Nor does Frequency fare much better with
another, more promising theme it touches upon--that of the tension between
past and present which figures so conspicuously in the fiction of Henry James
and Marcel Proust. Like many recent movies, this one takes some real pains to
evoke the past--that of 1969--with Elvis records, black and white video images
of that year's World Series as well as scenes that occur in a psychedelically
decorated disco with characters sporting memorably forgettable hippie attire.
Yet Frequency gets no further below the surface of the past than it
does that of middle class life. Its "sense of the past"
reduces to the nostalgic velleity of soused old timers hanging out in a
neighborhood tavern recalling the good old days of '69. Nevertheless, I doubt
if considerations of this kind are likely to disturb anyone who just wants to
be entertained and is not put off by the awkward mélange of
genres. If I often found Frequency frustrating, I cannot say I was ever
bored. In the last third of the film, where father and son are trying to
capture Shepherd, its high adrenalin style even stands it in good stead, and
provides some excitement that is relevant to the unfolding of the plot. Probably
the wisest thing is to try and set the movie's shortcomings aside while
watching it, like scraping mold off a piece of cheddar that has been sitting
in the refrigerator too long, and look at its strong points--first of all the
very solid performances by Dennis Quaid and James Caviezel in the main
roles. But it is the shots of the aurora borealis which
deserve a very special mention, even today when such cinematic wonders have
become commonplace. Looming up behind the Brooklyn Bridge, this spectacle has
something of the imposing magic of the shots of the city of the future in
Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926). Looking at it made me wonder what
William Burroughs would have done if he could have made a commercial film and
if he had had such effects at his disposal. One thing is certain: he would
have had a far better idea of what to do with them than do the makers of Frequency.