Dear Frankie

well this were the 2nd film on our movie night, I got to know it from wanda & since I"m still Fan of Gerard butler, I wanted to see the movie, and Ohh it was better than Law abiding citizen

Cast:Emily Mortimer, Gerard Butler, Sharon Small, Mary Riggans, Jack McElhone

Director:Shona Auerbach

Dear Frankie is what a romantic comedy, Dear Frankie tells the story of nine-year-old Frankie Morrison (Jack McElhone) a bonny deaf lad who, along with his mother Lizzie (Emily Mortimer) and chain-smoking Granny Nell (Mary Riggans) finds himself constantly moving from Scottish town to town, never given the chance to settle down. For Frankie, Lizzie is trying to protect her son from an abusive father, all the while pretending that he is in fact a sailor travelling the world on the HMS Accra. Frankie keeps writing letters to his father, which Lizzie intercepts and replies back to in the guise of his Dad.Frankie's letters are important to her "because it's the only way I can hear his voice."

Life in their new town starts promisingly enough. Frankie, an excellent lip reader, does well in his new school, even though he becomes the target of local (and slightly rubbish) bully Ricky Munroe (Sean Brown).But Frankie has been shielded from this reality in his life and is a sunny, smart boy, who helps people deal with his deafness by acting in a gently funny way. When the kid at the next desk in school writes "Def Boy" on Frankie's desk, Frankie grins and corrects his spelling.

And Lizzie finds herself a job in the local chippie, which is run by the very lovely Marie (Sharon Small).The deception works until, one day, a ship named the Accra actually docks in Glasgow. Frankie assumes his father is on board, but a schoolmate bets his dad doesn't care enough to come and see him. After all, Frankie is 9 and his father has never visited once. Frankie is determined to see the father he has not seen for years, and Lizzie, in a desperate attempt to shield her son from the truth, asks her new friend Marie to find a man who can act as Frankie’s father for one day. And so in steps The Stranger, a big brooding fella who agrees to help out for cash payment

"Call me Davey," the Stranger says, since that is the name of Frankie's dad. So we will call him Davey, too. He is a man who reveals nothing about himself, who holds himself behind a wall of reserve, who makes the arrangement strictly business. We follow Frankie and his "dad" through a day that includes a soccer game, and the inevitable visit to an ice-cream shop. At the end of the day, Davey tells Lizzie and Frankie that his ship isn't sailing tomorrow after all ,he'll be able to spend another day with his son. This wasn't part of the deal. But then Davey didn't guess how much he would grow to feel about the boy, and his mother.

And this is when Dear Frankie starts to get an enjoyably corny. For wouldn’t you know it, the wee little fella, being deaf and vulnerable and all, starts to melt The Stranger’s heart, who quickly begins to warm to Lizzie as well , Although Lizzie at first fights against The Stranger’s interest in her and her family, soon the affection is replicated. But can Lizzie really trust this man? How is she ever going to make peace with the husband she has been running away from all of these years? And exactly how much of the truth and lies that have been wrapped around him is Frankie aware of?

This sounds, I know, like the plot of a melodramatic tearjerker, but The missing father was brutal; Lizzie reveals to the Stranger, "Frankie wasn't born deaf. It was a gift from his dad." Lizzie, Frankie and his grandmother not as archetypes in a formula, but as very particular, cautious, wounded people, living just a step above poverty, precariously shielding themselves from a violent past. The grandmother gives every sign of having grown up on the wrong side of town, a chain-smoker who moved in with her daughter "to make sure" she didn't go back to the husband.

If this was a Hollywood production, The Stranger would prove his worth to Lizzie by beating up her husband and taking them all out for a burger or something. Fortunately it’s not, and as such Dear Frankie can afford to be a little more sophisticated. There is a shot toward the end of "Dear Frankie" when a man and a woman stand on either side of a doorway and look at each other, just simply look at each other. During this time they say nothing, and yet everything they need to say is communicated: Their doubts, cautions, hopes.What eventually happens, while not entirely unpredictable, benefits from close observation, understated emotions, unspoken feelings, and the movie's tact; it doesn't require its characters to speak about their feelings simply so that we can hear them.

However, Dear Frankie is a lovely little film, and you would enjoy watching it