Writer-director James Morosini’s I Love My Dad follows a father who catfishes his son in an attempt to re-enter the young man’s life. It’s a potentially uproarious concept, as the farcical hijinks seem as if they’d write themselves, what with the father juggling multiple identities in a ploy that comments on the a la carte realities that social media allows us to adopt. Yet Morosini isn’t aiming for a glorified SNL sketch or a passable Robin Williams vehicle. Instead, he fashions a wrenchingly personal artifact.
Morosini claims that I Love My Dad, winner of the top feature prize at this year’s SXSW, is wrested from his own life and that tracks with what’s on screen, as it feels as if it’s made from the raw matter of experience. The film isn’t exactly satisfying, in part because he keeps letting scenes drift by unfulfilled, but it has the fierce, untamed hum of an unresolved psychodrama.
Chuck (Patton Oswalt) is a middle-aged sad sack who expresses his creative side with low-level grifts; he’s an incorrigible bullshitter who thinks only of himself, bailing out on commitments that bore or scare him. And Chuck’s son, Franklin (Morosini), has had enough, blocking his dad from his phone and on Facebook. It’s obvious that Franklin would rather purge Chuck from his life than to allow his dad to pretend they have a relationship with superficial texts and posts.
Given that Franklin is profoundly vulnerable, living with his mother, Diane (Amy Landecker), and attending support groups for those with suicidal tendencies, his urge to give Chuck the boot suggests an attempt to throw himself a lifeline. Like any bona fide narcissist, Chuck sees Franklin’s emotional wreckage in terms of how it affects himself. Desperate, Chuck creates a Facebook profile using the info of a waitress at a local diner, Becca (Claudia Sulewski), and strikes up a correspondence with Franklin that blossoms into a romance.
This inescapably fucked-up scenario offers a veritable medley of identity theft, exploitation, psychological manipulation, and symbolic incest, and Morosini doesn’t shy away from the neurotic thorniness of his premise. In fact, I Love My Dad shines a light on the essential cruelty of farces, which hinge on elaborate structures of deception.
Classic farces obfuscate cruel foundations with elaborate narrative trickery, namely lightning pacing, while Morosini lets scenes hang, heavy and shaggy and foreboding. Morosini’s lack of formal polish here proves to be both a virtue and a hindrance. His refusal to utilize Chuck’s monstrous lie as fodder for easy jokes is empathetically commendable, though I Love My Dad also feels unfulfilled. It has a scenario rather than a plot, or even a point, and after a while you may feel that you know all there is to know about this film, long before it actually ends.
I Love My Dad seems slight, despite at least one outrageous sequence—and you’ll know it when you see it—because Morosini brings pain to the surface of the classic farce, draining the form of jokes, without deepening it. At the film’s low ebbs, this is the worst of depressive worlds. Chuck and Franklin are defined by classic signifiers—dweeby, selfish dad and traumatized son, respectively—and from there never surprise the audience.
Here, as in other work, Oswalt suggests Robin Williams’s neuroses while lacking the legendary comic’s trademark verbal fastball. Oswalt is more deliberate than Williams, and he’s occasionally very funny. In I Love My Dad, the actor’s sense of deliberation is most ironically evident in Chuck’s sense of casualness, in the ways in which Chuck tries to justify his absurd and indefensible scheme. Oswalt has a talent for playing a madman and a straight man at once, and it’s a pity Morosini doesn’t exploit it more.
Morosini’s acting is as raw as his directing, as there’s seemingly no distance between him and Franklin. His performance is disquieting, affecting, and almost unbearably intimate, suggesting Joaquin Phoenix without the technique and flamboyancy. And Oswalt and Morosini’s contrasting energies—control versus chaos—invest the film with unharnessed intensity. For both better and worse, I Love My Dad feels less like a film than an exorcism.
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