I Love My Dad

Survey evidence suggests that as many as one in five people in the UK have been catfished – that is, seduced by somebody online who was not what they claimed to be, an act most commonly motivated by financial gain. For others, this is a real puzzle. Beautiful, unreasonably enthusiastic women go straight in the bin along with Nigerian Princes and purveyors of singular weird tricks. Writer/director/star James Morosini puts the difference down to loneliness. The characters here are intensely lonely, and reaching out in pursuit of connection. It’s the dishonesty at the root of it which poisons the whole affair.

That dishonesty is principally located in Chuck (Patton Oswalt), who becomes a fount of loneliness when his son Franklin (Morosini) gets sick of his bullshit and stops communicating with him. It’s a pattern which many children of fantasist fathers will recognise, but Chuck’s own awareness is limited to analysing and re-analysing his own suffering, exhausting his friends in the process. Then he hits on an idea. If Franklin won’t talk to him, maybe he’ll talk to a beautiful, unreasonably enthusiastic woman. Before you know it, he’s posing as Becca (Claudia Sulewski), and Franklin is baring his soul – but inevitably, it all goes too far.

This is one of those farcical stories which would struggle to bear up its central conceit were it not rooted in truth. Morosini has said that it’s based on his own life, though he now has a positive relationship with his father. It’s partly this which makes the film so uncomfortable. Is it a story about blood being thicker than water and the hope of family reunion mattering more than anything, or is it a story about a habitual abuser who weasels his way back into people’s affections by repeatedly promising to change his behaviour? How you read it may well depend on your personal experience. One of the best things about cinema is that it encourages us to feel empathy for others, but in a case like this, one hopes that it will not contribute to gaslighting for people currently in vulnerable situations.

Oswalt is very good in the central role, and it’s really his film, played as a comedy but with his character no more aware of the joke than Franklin is, even if he’s in a better position to appreciate various ironies. He’s separated from Franklin’s mother – again, as such men are wont to be – and has a promising new relationship which he seems determined to ruin, not least by trying to recruit his girlfriend to assist with his scheme. That’s not the worst of it, though. Somewhat lacking in imagination, he bases the fictional girlfriend on a real woman with the same name, uses her real pictures and references her real place of work in the course of online conversations with his son. You can see what’s going to happen here. By the mid-point in the film, when Franklin is asking him to drive him across the country, so can he, but will he have the courage to own up and get out of it? Can he cope with breaking his son’s heart?

Morosini handles the direction pretty well – for the most part the film is well paced and energetic – but his Franklin is a little too sweet and naïve to be convincing. A few more rough edges would have made him more interesting and, very likely, more sympathetic – as it is, there doesn’t seem to be very much to him besides his sadness and victimhood. Sulewski is much stronger in the dual role of the real and fictional Beccas, the latter shaped in response to Franklin’s interests, larger than life but no more than many people’s exaggerated online personalities.

There’s a satirical approach to romcoms here along with the rest. You may feel somewhat voyeuristic being made privy to Franklin and Becca’s intimate texts. The exaggerated way in which they flirt is presented as a comment on internet romance specifically, though it doesn't seem very far removed from the way people traditionally interact when overwhelmed with those first intense feelings of connection. Of course, there is an argument here that even if the romance is fake, aspects of that connection are real, and what Franklin needs is to be closer to his father again – but that may be unwise, even in the absence of other fish in the sea.

Gamely played though it is, one can’t escape the feeling that this is merely the most sensational episode in a much more complex story. There are no real surprises, and what happens afterwards – what we don’t see – throws up more interesting dramatic possibilities. If you enjoy watching comedy designed to make people squirm, this will be right up your street, but beyond that, just like its central character, it’s ultimately nothing special.