Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

I really wanted to like Uncle Frank more. I liked Uncle Frank, the character, a lot—which would be thanks to a fine performance in the role by Paul Bettany. This is the guy who plays Vision in the Avengers films, and you’d certainly never realize it to watch him here, as a gay man returning from New York City to his small South Carolina hometown where his pathologically homophobic father has just died.

Frank also serves as mentor to his niece—hence the title—to 18-year-old Beth (Sophia Lillis, perhaps best known as Beverly from the It films), who is now going to the same New York college where Frank is a professor. Thus, the two wind up driving together back south for the funeral, illustrating a sort of familial connection surely many viewers will relate to, especially ones who are either gay, or had a favorite relative who turned out to be gay.

This uncle-niece relationship is easily the most realistic aspect of Uncle Frank, and by far what makes the film most watchable. I found myself moved by it in spite of the films many, many flaws.

Most significant is “Wally” (Peter Macdissi), short for Walid, Frank’s Saudi Arabian boyfriend. No one in Frank’s family knows about him, with the exception of his sister—and, now, Beth. Macdissi, who being Lebanese is at least legitimately Middle Eastern, if not actually Saudi Arabian, gives a serviceable performance of a role that is quite strangely naive as written. I would expect better from writer-director Alan Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under, and much, much more), and this particular script left me wondering if this movie represents an unfortunate yet all-too common late-career decline.

Frank comes from a deeply conservative Southern family, now in his late forties in the early seventies, no less—and still, Wally keeps pressuring Frank to come out to them, insisting that it doesn’t compare to the literally life-threatening fate that would await him had he stayed in Saudi Arabia. “It would bring shame on my family,” he says, quite directly suggesting it doesn’t compare to any possible reaction by a family in the American deep south. Seriously, Wally? He does this even knowing the tragic fate of a young boy Frank had taken an interest in during his youth—none of which makes any logical sense. In other words, Ball’s script makes the mystifying choice of not giving Wally any credit or perceptive intelligence.

Furthermore, the deeper we get into Uncle Frank, the more melodramatic it gets, with detours into dialogue that alternates between stilted and clichéd. Much of what transpires is frustratingly predictable, and reminiscent of more typical gay stories of yesteryear, from a time when writers didn’t know any better. I hesitate to say this film is over the top, but several moments come pretty damned close.

If it has any saving grace, it is the great cast, as Uncle Frank is packed with comfortably familiar faces: Steve Zahn as Frank’s younger brother Mike; Margo Martindale as his mother; Stephen Root as his dad; Judy Greer as his sister; even the always-lovely Lois Smith as his great aunt. We meet all these characters in the opening sequence of the movie, and it has a sort of instantly calming effect: who wouldn’t want to spend some time with all these people together? And for the most part, it is indeed a pleasant ninety minutes hanging out with them.

Much of the ending is rather saccharine, arguably unrealistic in its niceness, a sort of fairy tale that seems to be a little deluded about it being a fairy tale. I don’t mean to sound cynical; I still fell right into the trap of its transparent emotional manipulation and shed a few tears, both sad and happy, for these characters. And to be fair, the entire film is a nostalgic look into the past, and what else is nostalgia besides a comforting revisionist history? Plenty of viewers will find Uncle Frank to be a perfectly lovely experience overall; that does not make it a particularly high quality film. What disappoints me is its squandered potential, as this could have been far better, had Alan Ball bothered with much in the way of nuance. But, this is what we’ve got, and even if much of the script is informed by ignorance, at least in the end it’s of a more blissful sort.

*Just like Beth, Uncle Frank is my favorite in an otherwise incomprehensible world.*

Overall: B-