Nine-year-old Frankie and his single mum Lizzie have been on the move ever since Frankie can remember, most recently arriving in a seaside Scottish town. Wanting to protect her deaf son from the truth that they've run away from his father, Lizzie has invented a story that he is away at sea on the HMS Accra. Every few weeks, Lizzie writes Frankie a make-believe letter from his father, telling of his adventures in exotic lands. As Frankie tracks the ship's progress around the globe, he discovers that it is due to dock in his hometown. With the real HMS Accra arriving in only a fortnight, Lizzie must choose between telling Frankie the truth or finding the perfect stranger to play Frankie's father for just one day.. [TRAILER]

STEVEN SNYDER'S REVIEW

If you look closely, “Dear Frankie” is simply “The Wedding Date” with a bigger heart, German accent and the same dramatic problems.

In that romantic comedy, Debra Messing hired Dermot Mulroney as an escort to serve as her date for her sister’s wedding, and wound up falling in love with her hunky hooker. In “Dear Frankie,” Lizzie (Emily Mortimer) hires the appropriately-named Stranger (Gerard Butler) to impersonate her son’s (Jack McElhone) long-lost father, and he winds up falling love with both of them.

The fact that this involves a child, a single mother, and issues of family should not dissuade you. “Dear Frankie” elicits the same mindless goose-bumps as “Wedding Date,” but wallows in the same shallow ideas.

It is an unfortunate mutation for a story that, until the Stranger’s sudden appearance, confronts the issues of Lizzie and her young Frankie with a meditative seriousness.

For starters, Lizzie defies the archetypical movie “single mom.” She is a strong and passionate personality and she treats Frankie with such a degree of dignity that we often forget she has fled from a dangerous situation with her ex-husband, and that Frankie is almost completely deaf.

“He’s a champion lip-reader,” she says, as a means of getting others to stop yelling in his direction and to treat him like any other young boy. And she almost never speaks of her past, although it is a constant fear of both her and her mother (Mary Riggans) that the past might come walking through the door at any moment.

The film’s title alludes to both the letters Frankie writes to his father at sea, and the fictionalized responses that Lizzie writes back to her son, pretending to be her ex, Davey. This is the film’s most poignant vignette. These letters provide Lizzie the only opportunity to hear Frankie’s voice. Yet they are also part of a heartbreaking lie that a mother tells because the truth is just too tragic.

There are oceans of empathy in this film, which is a surprisingly modest story about a modest group of people. But then one day Frankie realizes that his dad’s ship, at sea for years, is scheduled to return to port, and Lizzie hires The Stranger to impersonate Davey rather than break her little boy’s heart.

It is here where these characters and their world, thus far depicted quietly and compassionately, cease feeling genuine.

As the reunion unfolds, Davey and Frankie do exactly what a father and son are expected to do in hopes of building memories. Davey goes to Frankie’s soccer match. They skip stones on a lake. They go to the ice cream parlor. What’s questionable, however, are the deteriorating politics of their relationship. We are asked to identify with elements of nostalgia and unconditional love, but they are only part of an artificial relationship, based on a series of lies.

So why does this matter?

For starters, it strips this world of its heart. No longer about real people, it is now instead focused on the execution of a conventional formula and the simplified suspense of whether the ruse will be discovered. Most problematic is the film’s conclusion, in which all the lies and deceit turn out to be no problem at all.

Rather than ask a serious question, “Dear Frankie” would rather soothe us with a fairy tale.

Optimistic movies are a good thing, but they need to be honest about what they are. “The Wedding Date” ignores all of the issues concerning prostitution, Messing’s self-esteem or her family’s dysfunction that led to the hiring of an escort in the first place.

Similarly, “Dear Frankie” is so quick to please that it quickly forgets and abandons all serious discussion of disabilities, single parents or respect between parents and offspring. It’s as fake as Davey’s letters back home.

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