One of the greatest achievements of a certain kind of Sundance movie is the ability to shine a light on an experience or community we hadn’t previously been aware of. This year’s stoic and sensitive drama Frank & Louis takes us behind bars, a place we’ve been many times before at this festival, but to shadow the taxing work of inmates taking care of those who have dementia, a specifically difficult job in an already difficult place. Petra Volpe, the Swiss writer-director, who last explored a far more known form of caregiving in exhausting nursing drama Late Shift, makes her English language debut with a film inspired by the “Gold Coats” peer support program at the California Men’s Colony state prison.
As with her previous film, there’s real rigour to how she zeroes in on the grind of under-appreciated labour, but while Late Shift was more naturalistic and experiential, Frank & Louis is far more formulaic and emotional, a clearer bid for the heartstrings. It’s a topic that’s hard not to get emotional about, the slow loss of one’s mental abilities, something many of us might be horribly familiar with, and it’s a tough, rather hopeless experience to witness on screen.
It’s one that Frank (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is inexperienced with, moving to his umpteenth prison while serving a decades-long sentence for murder. But he signs up to a care program as he awaits his parole hearing, hoping his involvement might soften the hard edges of his crime. It’s caregiving as a form of rehabilitation and I was reminded of last year’s far darker HBO documentary The Alabama Solution, which showed how inmates were forced to take on the role of rehab counselor – former addicts trying to save the lives of those still in the grip. This is far more structured but there’s a similar sense of the untrained tackling a role that would typically require a huge amount of training. Frank is thrown in at the deep end and expected not to drown, warned by a no-nonsense counselor (Indira Varma) that failure could impact negatively on his file.
He’s paired with Louis (Rob Morgan), whose aggressive resistance to any form of help, even as his condition rapidly worsens, leaves Frank in a difficult spot. The two men slowly find a bond, the toughness of their learned and necessary facades slowly melting as Louis realises he needs to accept care and Frank figures out how to effectively provide it. Volpe finds poignance in their increased physical closeness – the power of a hand helping to steady – and as we learn more about their past crimes and their fractured families, she raises thorny questions. Frank discovers Louis was someone who once violently ruled the yard, making enemies, some of whom still haunt him, waiting for revenge. But Louis can barely recall the facts of his life, let alone the worst things he’s done within it, so is it right for someone to be punished for something they can’t remember doing? One of Frank’s fellow carers is a Latino man (Puerto Rican rapper Residente) having to look after a swastika-tattooed racist. How much care does he deserve?
In sticking to a more conventional structure, Volpe’s film often feels a little too by-the-book. She might have found an unusual way in, but she’s still taking us to a place we know well, at least from afar. The scenes of Frank away from Louis can often feel a little too generic, and unrevealing, and at times, it feels as if the story, with an inevitable end signposted early on, doesn’t have quite enough to power a full movie. Volpe wisely keeps her direction unfussy and her continued interest in caregiving is unusually admirable, yet I found some of her score to be a little flat and anonymous, absent strings failing to lift some of the more emotive last act scenes. It works when it works because of its two central performances. Ben-Adir is handed a somewhat standard-issue prison character – quiet, keeps to himself, reserves his strength until it’s absolutely needed – but he avoids the strong, silent stereotype, controlling his understandable waves of anger, fear and upset, adding depth to a character who, on the page, is in need of some.
Morgan is the perfect example of a recognisable, but not widely, famous character actor who has deserved a bigger, better chance. He’s found a home at Sundance, with roles in Pariah, Mudbound, Monsters and Men and The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and the nature of this particular role and the heart-wrenching strength of his performance feels like enough to edge him into new, possibly awards-worthy territory. His moments of grim realisation – that something is shifting, fading, dying – are pretty wrecking to watch, a man no longer able to protect and sustain himself as he always has, growing to rely upon and eventually love a caregiver who isn’t family or even friend. Frank & Louis is a solidly made drama, but Ben-Adir and Morgan are something special.
