Review of Frequency (2000) by Gareth R — 06 Jul 2010

In Frequency, a man can communicate with his dead father using a ham radio. They're both using the same radio, one in 1969, and his son, a broken man since his Dad died all those years ago, speaking to him in the present. How? Doesnâ??t matter. The story comes first, and since time travel is about as far-out as science fiction gets, why bother trying to explain it? Nobody ever asked how the Flux Capacitor worked.

It's refreshing to see a film unashamedly throw in its lot in with a fantasy conceit, but even more so to run with it. Chances are, you think you've got the plot figured out already. Son tries to tell his father how not to get killed, right? Well, yes, but most of the film takes place afterwards, and it doesn't go where other films would have. It seems like a foregone conclusion that Daddy Dearest will have to die all over again in the end, in order to put time right. Well, not in this movie: there's no travelling back to the past a second time, and what's done is done. That's a fantastic way to take a potentially predictable premise - i.e., guy changes the past with bad consequences - and making it unpredictable.

Frequency doesn't get bogged down in paradoxes and purely fictitious Laws Of Time, and quite right. Movies are fake. We know they are. But we don't need them to tell us how fake they are, like having the character just dream the whole thing, or sending the universe back to how it was in the beginning with just a few people left shaking their heads and saying "Did that really happen?" What's the point investing in fiction if it doesn't even believe its own nonsense? Frequency, by comparison, has the guts to change things and stick with it. You don't get that often.

It's a very affecting story that really does - forgive the cliché - keep you guessing right up to the end. Admittedly, some things hold it back. While Dennis Quaid is suitably charming (yet flawed) as the doomed fireman, Jim Caveizel lacks any kind of presence as his son. John (Caveizel) is a greasy sadsack, and his moping, though explained, simply got on my nerves. Also annoying, but a necessary evil, is the way the plot drifts away from the initial father/son connection. While it does morph into a very effective thriller with plenty of clever moments, there comes a point where it's not about the same thing any more, and it feels as though one person came up with the saves-father-with-radio plot, and another with the rest of the movie. Oh, and lastly, Frequency is set in Queens (in both time-zones), and all the actors lay on such aggressively thick Noo Yawk accents that they sound like theyâ??re auditioning for bit parts in Goodfellas. Their voices occasionally took me out of the story, not because they're unintelligible, but because it sounds so put on.

Frequency is quite a long movie, and it's not perfect. But it can be genuinely clever, its basic conceit is one we can all probably relate to, and ultimately it's one of the most satisfying time travel movies I've seen, because it doesn't go down what's become the established path. That sense of anything-could-happen pulls it through to the end, despite the ever fuzzying handle on the relationship at its heart.