Frequency Review
By Joe Lozito
Father Time
"Frequency", directed by Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear, Fallen) from a screenplay by first-timer Toby Emmerich, explores what happens when, through a better-left-unexplained bit of cosmic happenstance revolving loosely around the appearance of the Northern Lights high above Queens in both 1969 and 1999, a son is able to communicate with his long-dead firefighter father via his old ham radio. Actually, the film explores that all in the first ten minutes or so. After that, the script piles on one borderline plot contrivance after another as Frank and John Sullivan (played extremely earnestly by Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel) muck with the space-time continuum for the benefit of their nuclear family.
There are a lot of "Back to the Future" moments - photographs with family members appearing and disappearing - and a healthy dose of "It's a Wonderful Life" moments as well - with family members either dying or being reunited after death in another timeline. However, the film wants to have it both ways. It plays with the ability to save lives using knowledge of the future, but with these new, significant differences in the past, very little changes in the present. Most of the time, a person will disappear from a picture, but everyone still lives in the same house and not a lick of furniture has been moved. All that usually changes are the memories of the events. Do people have so little influence over their surroundings for thirty years?
If "Frequency" works at all, and it does at times, it is because it is grounded, ironically, by its wonderfully unrealistic premise. Mr. Quaid and Mr. Caviezel make a good father-son team, united by their brooding intensity and their encyclopedic knowledge of the '69 Mets. Particularly good is Mr. Quaid who seems to have matured out of a second-string Harrison Ford into a leading man in his own right.
"Frequency" has the same spirit of Americana as a Norman Rockwell painting or a Frank Capra classic. And, like Mr. Rockwell and Mr. Capra before them, the filmmakers know that if you take a Father and Son relationship, add a touch of death, and maybe an extraneous serial killer plotline, you've got yourself a genuine heartstring-tugger. And all the syrupy sweetness that goes with it. Maybe years of unbridled cynicism have made it an impossible task for a film like this to work. If that's the case though, it's certainly not from lack of trying.
