Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Uncle Frank’ on Amazon Prime, a Clumsy Dramedy From Filmmaker Alan Ball

Now on Amazon Prime, Uncle Frank is the new film by Alan Ball, Oscar-winning writer of American Beauty and Emmy-winning creator of Six Feet Under and True Blood. It may be a more personal story from the writer-director this time — Ball is a gay man from Marietta, Georgia, and the film stars Paul Bettany as a New York college professor hiding his homosexuality from his smalltown South Carolina family. Now let’s see if this movie makes a significant connection with its audience.

UNCLE FRANK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Betty (Sophia Lillis) and her uncle Frank (Bettany) are the black sheep of the Bledsoe family. The Bledsoe men most important to the plot here — shouty and cantankerous grandfather Daddy Mac (Stephen Root) and his chip off the old block Mike (Steve Zahn), who’s Frank’s brother/Beth’s dad — grunt at the football game on TV. The women — grandma Mammaw (Margo Martindale), Beth’s dingdong mother Kitty (Judy Greer), an elderly bigot aunt (Lois Smith) — fuss over dinner in the kitchen. Meanwhile, Betty and Uncle Frank talk about books out on the porch. She’s a thoughtful teenager, well-read and studious. He’s an NYU prof with some sage advice: maybe she should get out of Crumbton or Crowscrap or whatever this backwater town is, where experiences are narrow and minds are narrower.

FOUR YEARS LATER, Betty has rechristened herself Beth, and is getting oriented at NYU. She crashes a party at Uncle Frank’s apartment and, this being 1973, finds out that he smokes pot (or “pawwwt,” as a smalltown Southern girl Beth says) and has been hiding his boyfriend for a decade. Wally (Peter Macdissi) is a gregarious, huggy type who’s heard all about Beth, but not vice-versa. She naively drinks too much martini and gets pukey and stays the night at Frank and Wally’s. She hasn’t even shaken off the cobwebs the next morning when the phone rings. Daddy Mac dropped dead. They have to go home for the funeral. Wally wants to join them, but Frank resists. They bicker. Wally is from Saudi Arabia and hasn’t come out to his parents, so why so much pressure for Frank to come out to his? Because they’re American, Wally insists, but he may not yet know the difference between America and ’Merica.

Because Kitty doesn’t want Beth to fly (them aer-o-planes sometimes fall right outta the sky y’know), Wally offers his car. Down the road a stretch or three, Beth and Frank soon realize they’re being followed — by Wally! He seems dead-set on making Frank’s life more complicated. Isn’t mourning your god-fearin’, gay-hatin’ father who all but disowned you difficult enough without revealing your orientation to the rest of the hayseeds in your family? But Wally wants to be supportive for the love of his life, which is noble, I guess, but not practical. Wally’s jubilant tone lightens the movie’s load a bit until they get to Creeksville, where Frank conjures his old demon, alcohol, and we’re subject to a montage of post-funeral casseroles in close-up. Will the closet door stay closed?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: At first, Uncle Frank is kinda like a relatively witless Lady Bird, and then it’s sorta like Green Book but with a different slice of the American bigotry pie, and then it’s mostly just a soap opera.

Performance Worth Watching: Ball has a hell of a cast here, from veteran character actors like Root, Greer and Martindale to a promising newcomer in Lillis (who was the standout in It) and a heavy-hitter like Bettany. But I like Macdissi the best. He’s an upbeat presence and comic catalyst who wiggles around the screenplay’s cliches the best he can.

Memorable Dialogue: “‘Nice’ always hides something.” — Wally shows a little skepticism, re: human nature

Sex and Skin: Nothin’ but kissin’.

Our Take: Uncle Frank is three episodes crudely stapled together. The first act is 18-year-old Beth’s first time away from home, her culture-shock journey to the big city, where she meets a boy who isn’t what he seems, learns a hard lesson or two and is saved by Uncle Frank at the same time she learns all about him. The second act is a cross-country road trip sort-of-comedy, complete with gettin’-to-know-ya convos and the omnipresent threat of prejudice from side-eye strangers. And the third act is uncut melodramatic schmaltz, complete with gauzy, upsetting flashbacks, an awkward narrative fakeout and a too-tidy, E-Z Cheez ending.

Which is to say, the movie’s a lumpy thing that doesn’t really function as a complete story. But it’s also slickly directed and easy to watch, and the cast tries to make the best of it. Cliches and stereotypes abound. Characters are either thinly rendered or fulfill predictable destinies. One of its major dramatic revelations is as subtle as finding a tire iron in your two-egg omelet. Its morals are pat and simple: Conservative Southerners sometimes can be more open-minded — or less prejudiced? — than you think; old people are too old to change, unless they don’t think the way you thought they thunk so there’s no need to think they need to change; gay people are people too, ya bigot; and wasn’t this a coming-of-age movie at one point, narrated by the Naif in New York? Yeah, so, what of it? Haven’t we seen enough coming-of-age movies already? Don’t you need to see a different type of movie you’ve also seen enough of already, the pain-of-coming-out story, because gay people so rarely have other events and happenings in their lives that are worthy of a movie?

Our Call: SKIP IT. Uncle Frank is sloppily written, simplistic, well-meaning crowdpleaser fare, and I almost half-liked it for its performances and despite its fumblings. But it’s too superficial and mundane to recommend.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Uncle Frank on Amazon Prime