95 min | R | November 25, 2020 | Amazon Studios
Frank Bledsoe teaches literature in New York and keeps a whole life hidden from his South Carolina family. His father’s death forces a road trip home with his college-age niece and the partner nobody back home knows about. Some closets come with a long driveway.
Frank Bledsoe teaches literature in New York in 1973. He has left South Carolina behind and built a life with Wally, a partner his family does not know exists. His niece Beth follows him north to college and learns who her uncle is. The death of Frank’s father pulls him back to the South he fled, and Beth and Wally ride along. Alan Ball builds the film around the distance between the self Frank performs at home and the self he lives in the city. The real subject is shame and the family that taught it to him.
Paul Bettany plays Frank with controlled poise that cracks under pressure. He keeps the pain behind good manners and a glass of liquor until the manners stop working. Sophia Lillis plays Beth with open curiosity and a teenager’s quick adjustment to a world larger than home. Peter Macdissi plays Wally with a warmth that refuses to apologize, and he makes self-acceptance look like the hardest thing in the film. Stephen Root turns Daddy Mac’s cruelty into a few short scenes that explain everything about Frank. Margo Martindale plays Mammaw with a plainspoken grief that cuts through the surrounding melodrama.
Alan Ball writes and directs, and the film carries the tidy construction of a television veteran. The 1973 period lives in wood-paneled interiors, station-wagon road footage, and a needle-drop soundtrack that signals each emotional beat before the actors reach it. Ball stages the family confrontations cleanly and cuts away before they turn ugly enough to scar. The flashbacks to Frank’s adolescence arrive on schedule and explain the wound with a directness the rest of the film does not need. The craft is competent and safe. The script reaches for trauma and then smooths it into something an audience can finish without discomfort.
Uncle Frank knows exactly what it wants to say and says it without much friction. Bettany and Lillis give the film more interior life than the screenplay earns. The story of a man returning to the place that taught him to hate himself carries real stakes. Ball keeps reaching for the safe version of every scene. The result moves and reassures in equal measure. It is a kind film about cruelty that never quite trusts the audience to sit in the dark with it.