Roger Ebert used to say it’s not what a movie’s about but how it’s about it. I found that thought inescapable throughout the entirety of “I Love My Dad,” a comedy about a desperate father who reconnects with his estranged son by catfishing him, pretending to be a hot girl who the young man comes to believe to be his girlfriend. “The following actually happened,” insists the opening on-screen text. “My dad asked me to tell you it didn’t.” That gets a laugh. It’s one of the last.
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James Morosini, who also wrote and directed, stars as Franklin, a young and troubled man who is just out of a treatment facility after an attempted suicide. A fair portion of his trouble seems the result of his mistreatment by his father Chuck (Patton Oswalt), a compulsive liar who never showed up and always had a bad excuse for it. As part of his healing, Franklin cuts Chuck out of his life, blocking his calls and social media profiles.
Weeping openly at a diner, Chuck finds a sympathetic ear in the form of Becca (Claudia Sulewski), an attractive young waitress. Chuck finds her on social and starts downloading photos of her, a scene that seems to set itself up as a troubling peek into Chuck’s masturbation rituals. But no, what he’s up to is even worse: he uses her name and photos to set up a fake profile, friends his kid, and starts chatting. Franklin is slightly suspicious but ultimately receptive, because he’s online and her pictures are hot, and soon they’re messaging all day, every day.
Of course, images of people staring at phones and text bubbles on screen get tiresome quickly, so we begin to see Becca as Franklin does: he visualizes her next to him, talking, laughing, sharing secrets. Initially, the device is clever; it is, indeed, funny when this young woman blurts out what are clearly the thoughts of his middle-aged father. But these visualizations are ultimately a mistake, because Becca is overtly sexualized in a way that underscores the deeply, deeply creepy nature of what we’re watching. And the cruelty of the lie is just tonally insurmountable, as Franklin’s suicidal inclinations make the stakes so high that it’s hard for the film to have any real fun with it.
Some of the supporting players try, and (to some extent) succeed. Lil Rel Howery, always welcome, appears as one of Chuck’s co-workers, and gets the enviable job of mouthing such needed truths as “This is the creepiest shit I’ve ever seen ever, for real” and “Chuck, this is incest!” and “You’re about to ruin your son’s life!” Rachel Dratch pops up as Chuck’s boss/girlfriend, and is also very funny, cutting him down to size with (accurate) reactions like “That sounds mean and stupid.”
But “I Love My Dad” cannot overcome its off-putting premise. Nothing is out of bounds, of course (especially in comedy), but if there’s an approach to make the material palatable, either played straight or broad, it is left undiscovered here. The picture reaches its nadir during a road trip sequence, in which Franklin locks himself in a motel bathroom to have cyber sex with his “girlfriend” while Chuck has cyber sex with his, copy-pasting her responses. You could see how this could be subversive, or darkly funny (“Spanking the Monkey” comes to mind, and not for the first time), but because Morosini has gone all in on the visualization gimmick, he stages actual sex scenes to distract us from what’s actually happening – and then interrupts all of it for a heartfelt angry emotional argument between father and son. What even is this movie?
It all finally blows up, of course, but at the latest possible moment and in the dopiest method imaginable – reminding the viewer of another Ebert-ism, the Idiot Plot, which is “any plot containing problems that would be solved instantly if all of the characters were not idiots.” But without the Idiot Plot, we wouldn’t get the big dramatic implosion, which doesn’t work for that and a million reasons besides. Morosini, as an actor, is part of the problem – for most of the picture, he’s a bit of a charisma void, and the big-time emotion required by the ultimate realization of what’s happened is simply out his grasp. It’s painful to watch, and not for what the character is going through, but for how badly he’s acting it.
Oswalt does his best to create sympathy, or at least empathy, for a character that’s barely better adjusted than the protagonist of “Big Fan.” He flails amusingly at connecting with the kid, and puts his all into his earnest moments. But you just can’t do anything with this character, or this premise. “I Love My Dad” may find an audience, or at least a handful of admirers, for the possibilities it hints at, and its willingness to tell an off-putting story. It’s the kind of movie that gets praised for being risky, but not for actually being any good. [D+]
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