FRANKLYN Review

Founder and Editor; Toronto, Canada (@AnarchistTodd)
FRANKLYN Review

[Our thanks to Bryan from Cinema Suicide for the following review.]

Franklyn caught me off guard. I managed to see the trailer on a site much like this one and it wasn't clear what the movie is about. The trailer is a testament to misleading advertisement. A studio pays for a movie to be produced and agrees to distribute it. They see the script, of course, and like what they see, but if you've ever read the shooting draft of a script and then see the released feature, they often differ in some fundamental ways. It's a great script but what often looks great on the page sometimes doesn't translate to the lens well and changes must be made on the fly. The studio then sees the final project and realizes that this is not what they paid for. The marketing machine cranks to life and produces a series of marketing materials that makes their challenging feature look like something it's not and gets as many asses in seats as it can before everyone leaves the theater and starts texting everyone in their address book to tell them the movie sucks.

Not that Franklyn sucks, but the trailer featured one aspect of the movie heavier than the rest and completely excluded one piece, entirely. It was made to look like a steampunk piece of science fiction or fantasy; a bizarre riff on superheroes. Capes and costumes are still pretty hot at the box office right now and steampunk is this genre aesthetic that has been creeping around the margins of mainstream science fiction for years now but that's not really what Franklyn is. What Franklyn is, actually, is still a bit of a mystery having seen it.

Franklyn begins in the fictional setting of Meanwhile City. Solitary vigilante, Johnathan Preest, the only atheist in Meanwhile City, where faith is an enforced requirement, is out on the streets looking for The Individual, a cult leader who has kidnapped and murdered a little girl. In modern day London, Milo, heartbroken and fresh out of divorce chases a woman around the city that he believes to be his childhood sweetheart. A desperately lonely and suicidal artist, Emilia, battles with her social butterfly mother during therapy and conducts an art project that involves her videotaping her suicide attempts. David, a deeply religious man, searches for his disturbed and homeless son on the streets. Each of these stories seems, at first, completely disconnected from one another, but as the picture moves along, it becomes clear that each is connected to the others, spiralling inward to it's conclusion when all the pieces fall into place, or so it seems.

Director Gerald McMorrow, like most feature filmmakers borne from the world of advertisements and music videos, has style in spades and has directed a particularly nice looking movie packed to the rafters with incredibly detailed sets and an overall aesthetic that brings to mind Alex Proyas' Dark City. That is, when we're in Meanwhile City. However, like a lot of directors from his particular proving grounds, the need to cram as much glamor into thirty seconds to five minutes leaves a lot to be desired in the narrative department as they move from the short form to the long form. While Franklyn is built around a pretty cool central framework, that being four individuals orbiting each other, one of whom exists in an entirely different world, the relationships that bind them in the third act are flimsy at best and not even remotely meaningful. The story unfolds nicely, in a novel way, but each main character is slammed togehter in the finale in a way that is nothing short of forceful.

I could have watched an entire picture about Johnathan Preest. Meanwhile City, apart from London, is probably given the most detail and is a character unto itself, which is telling of McMorrow's ability to craft a worthwhile story since his characters all seem so shallow while his grimy dystopian Frankenstein hybrid of studio sets and CGI is a lush and vibrant place that I wish got more screen time than it did. However, McMorrow wins points for quietly working his influences into the movie without pounding you over the head with his particular film school pedigree. There's an obvious Alan Moore influence that is comforting and while all of Preest's narrations practically scream 'Rorschach's journal', it lacks the fractured Nietszche that defines Watchmen. As well as Watchmen, the Preest portions could be mistaken for a story torn from the pages of 2000 AD. Make no mistake, all obvious signs asides, this is a very British perspective on the comic book, something sorely missing from Hollywood comic book adaptations. There are also whole scenes lifted from Escape From New York that, while recognizable to the trained eye, are still original enough to fit nicely into the rest of the picture. Meanwhile City, itself, is an awful lot like William Gibson's Chiba City, filtered through the sensibilities of Jules Verne. The downside to all of this novelty, though, is that the Milo/Emilia/David portions of the story are spent wondering when we're going to get back to Preest's hunt for The Individual. McMorrow has spent so much energy developing the wrong parts of the movie.

Most of the cast seems lost, too. Everyone wanders through their scenes wondering where they're going, playing out their lives on autopilot as they draw to the endgame. The only person in control is Ryan Phillippe, a role originally intended for Ewan MacGregor. The mystery of how they're all going to wind up in the same frame at the end is a compelling device, though. Script shortcomings aside, Franklyn is a good enough idea to float the entire picture. The final product is a mixed bag, at best, and a fan cut of the movie that slices out the real world bits is inevitable but while Franklyn is wobbly on its feet, it sometimes clicks. The ultimate verdict is that it's a visually gorgeous movie with a weak plot foundation. The fantasy elements shine like diamonds but reality, where most of the movie takes place, isn't enough since even in the end, it's unclear as to what the point of all this was.

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