I Love My Dad – first-look review

James Morosini’s debut fea­ture, I Love My Dad, is per­son­al to a fault. The open­ing title card insists to view­ers that ​“this actu­al­ly hap­pened to [him]” and, whilst that embar­rass­ing lev­el of hon­esty works for a while, it ulti­mate­ly tips his hand about how deeply he plans to inter­ro­gate the moral and psy­cho­log­i­cal effects of his cen­tral premise.

To wit, Morosi­ni stars as Franklin, a young man with severe depres­sion fresh out of his lat­est men­tal clin­ic stint resolved to final­ly cut all ties with his dead­beat eter­nal­ly-flaky dad, Chuck (Pat­ton Oswalt). Refus­ing to take the hint that his son wants him out of his life, Chuck decides to cat­fish Franklin via steal­ing the iden­ti­ty of a Maine barista he fre­quents, Bec­ca (Clau­dia Sulews­ki), and pos­ing as her online in an effort to res­cue their relationship.

Since Bec­ca is a con­ven­tion­al­ly pret­ty woman and Franklin is a social­ly-awk­ward young man crav­ing some form of con­nec­tion, this esca­lates quick­ly. These stretch­es of the film are fun, deliv­er­ing cringe-com­e­dy that’s suit­ably squirm-induc­ing and unafraid to go all the way in depict­ing the log­i­cal con­clu­sion of Chuck-Bec­ca and Franklin’s inter­ac­tions. Morosi­ni man­ages to con­cep­tu­alise these text-based con­ver­sa­tions in engag­ing ways.

Hav­ing Chuck-Bec­ca pop out of ran­dom cor­ners of the world in a man­ner which dis­as­so­ci­ates Franklin from every­one else around him, fur­ther­ing Morosini’s the­sis about the dan­gers in giv­ing one­self total­ly over to anony­mous online rela­tion­ships, as well as play­ing up ver­balised abbre­vi­a­tions and typos for laughs thanks to Sulewski’s break­out per­for­mance. It’s a strong show­case for Oswalt’s tal­ents, going full pathet­ic odi­ous­ness in a way which is con­sis­tent­ly enter­tain­ing to watch.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, I Love My Dad also has a potent sen­ti­men­tal­ist streak and it’s one that over­takes the last half-hour. Morosini’s screen­play is unable or unwill­ing to ful­ly reck­on with the poten­tial cat­a­stroph­ic effects that Chuck’s manip­u­la­tion could have on Franklin’s near-sui­ci­dal men­tal state, play­ing the non-roman­tic parts of the bond­ing between Chuck-Bec­ca and Franklin almost com­plete­ly straight. For as much as Chuck-Bec­ca can func­tion as a com­men­tary on the ways in which men cre­ate ide­alised ver­sions of women who can save them, the movie at large has a wor­ry­ing dis­in­ter­est in the auton­o­my of the women in both mens’ lives, most evi­dent in the cli­max when the real Bec­ca is dis­card­ed almost imme­di­ate­ly after the reveal has served its pur­pose. (Not to men­tion a sim­i­lar usage of anoth­er woman in the epi­logue beat.)

I Love My Dad also does that deeply frus­trat­ing thing a lot of Amer­i­can indies do, where, right when the dra­mat­ic peak crests and every­thing falls apart, we smash-cut to sev­er­al months lat­er for a brief epi­logue that con­ve­nient­ly bypass­es all the dif­fi­cult emo­tion­al fall­out. Maybe that’s due to run­ning out of time or mon­ey, but in prac­tice, it feels like a desire to avoid any­thing which can­not be played for cringe com­e­dy so we can reach an unearned hap­py end­ing. This move is symp­to­matic of a writer-direc­tor who just can’t quite stick the boot in due to being too close to the top­ic at hand. What’s left is often fun­ny with strong per­for­mances, but balk­ing at the full insid­i­ous­ness of the premise means it can’t hang with oth­er dark-com­e­dy greats like World’s Great­est Dad.