Courtesy Magnolia Pictures
Movies
Fledgling filmmaker James Morosini (who has done a ton of acting in shows like American Horror Story and The Sex Lives of College Girls) comes out swinging with his directorial/screenwriting debut, I Love My Dad—a strange trip through the lives of an estranged father and son and a slight critique of how social media can connect us or tear us further apart.
Morosini also plays the lead here, the enigmatic Franklin who, following a failed suicide attempt, moves back in with his mother to try and get on with his life. We don’t learn the particulars of Franklin’s case, but we do know he’s a bit of a gaming nerd, he’s not quite healed and he’s set some healthy boundaries with his father, Chuck, (a brilliantly pathetic Patton Oswalt) after years of missed graduations, birthdays, etc. We learn about these things through a rather clever montage of voice mails from Chuck that will likely feel all too real to some viewers. Flailing and desperate, Chuck creates an online persona using photos nicked from a local diner waitress named Becca (Claudia Sulewski). The idea is that he’ll regain some semblance of closeness to his kid, but Franklin ultimately falls in love with the fake young woman, and Chuck keeps the ruse going despite his better judgment.
Franklin perceives his new DM-based relationship as real-world exchanges with Becca, which come across as funny and silly at first, but ultimately devolve into scary, unhealthy and downright gross. This is where Morosini’s writing and acting chops work best, and Sulewski’s take on a ghostly non-person is a delight. Somehow, she manages to create a character we feel like we know without actually knowing, and played against Morosini’s sweet-but-damaged Franklin, it works. Oswalt, as always, is a delight. How can it be you’d still feel for a man who would have fake phone sex with his son, or who lies to his own girlfriend (a brief appearance from the inimitable Rachel Dratch) so easily? You do, though, and that might have something to do with how we all create our own personas and deploy them across various milieus, online and real-world.
Morosini reportedly based the film on his real-life relationship with his father, and one could probably wax poetic on how acting is a search for the truth. Point is, it’s ballsy and relatable for those who struggle to reconcile with disparate ideas of their own fathers. In other words, at what point do we perceive our parents as real people? The film even says something to the effect of, “He’s just some guy who ended up having a kid.” Through those feelings, Morosini takes us to the brink of despair and back out again. Families are complicated—hope might be the best some of us can do for now.
7
+Weird but real; funny but thoughtful
-Could have gone deeper into the fallout
I Love My Dad
Directed by Morosini
With Morosini, Oswalt, Sulewski and Dratch
VoD, R, 96 min.
