Franklyn

Franklyn (Director: Gerald McMorrow): Featuring a fairly high-profile cast (Ryan Phillippe, Eva Green, Sam Riley), this film from first-time dir­ector Gerald McMorrow was making its North American premiere at Toronto After Dark, nearly a year after it premiered in London. Digging around a little on the IMDB site, I found that it’s done very little busi­ness the­at­ric­ally and will have a dif­fi­cult time recouping its $12 mil­lion budget. Now nor­mally I don’t care about such mat­ters, but in the case of Franklyn, it may be some­what instructive.

The film gradu­ally weaves together four sep­arate threads. Three of the char­ac­ters live in present-day London, while one (Phillippe) exists in a futur­istic steam­punk world called Meanwhile City. The trailer and mar­keting mater­ials lean heavily on the steam­punk angle to try to lure genre fans such as those who attend Toronto After Dark, but in reality, the steam­punk seg­ments, though beau­tiful to look at, are the least sat­is­fying parts of the film. The blame for this lies squarely at the feet of the casting dir­ector. Phillippe is simply dreadful in a role that by all rights should have gone to a British actor. Playing a masked vigil­ante atheist in a city where reli­gion is the law, Phillippe attempts action-hero stuff by fighting “clerics” and deliv­ering a pon­derous voiceover.

When the film cuts back to the other char­ac­ters, it feels like we’re in a com­pletely dif­ferent movie. Eva Green plays a sui­cidal artist whose bizarre video pro­jects seem to exist in the film only to show her in dif­ferent out­fits and with dif­ferent makeup. Sam Riley is a heart­broken young man whose child­hood ima­ginary friend sud­denly reappears. Bernard Hill plays a quietly reli­gious man looking for his son who has escaped from a mental asylum. Although I don’t want to spoil any­thing, I think you might be able to figure out where this is headed.

I’m not opposed to this sort of psy­cho­lo­gical thriller. In fact, just a few weeks ago I men­tioned Paperhouse (1988), another British film which sim­il­arly blended genres to come up with some­thing fresh. And I will give McMorrow credit for an inter­esting idea which he is able to tie together nicely by the ending. But for most of the run­ning time, audi­ences are likely to be con­fused, and for genre audi­ences like those at Toronto After Dark, I sus­pect most would have pre­ferred to watch a film that was com­pletely set in the steam­punk uni­verse. To make mat­ters worse, the casting of Ryan Phillippe was a huge mis­step; his line read­ings had me rolling my eyes very early in the film.

I sus­pect that this will head straight to DVD on this side of the pond, and it would make an inter­esting rental, but one can only hope that McMorrow will get another chance to do a genre-blending film the right way.

(6/10)

Tagged as: #afterdark09, steampunk