Subject: Review: Frequency (2000)

From: Jerry Saravia <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2001 19:49:16 -0000

Time-travel can be an exciting arena for the cinema because it defies all logic
and pretense. After all, it does not seem feasible that we can travel backwards
in time, but the very notion does bring up all kinds of strange paradoxes, as
does traveling forward into the future. But then you have a film like
"Frequency" which asks not so much to defy logic but to defy reason. 

Consider the premise of the film. You have a sullen cop named John Sullivan (Jim
Caveziel) who removes an old ham radio from his closet. He plays with it and
discovers one night that he can communicate with his father (Dennis Quaid). Here
is the catch: John's father, a dedicated firefighter, died in a horrific blazing
fire while in the line of duty. So it is John in 1999 having conversations with
his dad who is alive and well in 1969! How can this be? Can it be the strange
forms of lights in the night sky that are causing a break in the space-time
continuum? Or, to be more radical, could it be that it is all in John's mind?
Nevertheless, we are left with suspending logic temporarily since John realizes
his father will die in that fire within a few days in 1969, just before the Mets
play their first game in the World Series! Can John prevent his father from
dying in the past? And wouldn't that rupture the space-time continuum? 

I am willing to suspend disbelief at the cinemas as much as everyone else, but
there is something horribly wrong from the get-go. Though the story is not
possible by any stretch of the imagination, in terms of just pure scientific
reasoning, how could John be talking to his father from the past? Would that not
be changing the future at all just based solely on that premise alone? And how
can John only feel that the future has changed until his father changes the past
at the approximate time that coincides with the time in the future? Why should
that matter? And if everything can be erased as it is with (*SPOILER*) John's
father surviving the fire, then how can John feel an alternate time line
existing when no one else can? Just a matter of logic and reasoning based on the
filmmaker's rules. Stephen Hawking would have a field day with all this. 

All paradoxes aside, the basic problem with "Frequency" is that I never believed
the relationship between John and his father. Simply put, there is no chemistry
between Dennis Quaid and Jim Caveziel - they do not make a fitting father-son
combo. And frankly all the time paradoxes, and an implausible serial-killer plot
to boot, distract from the emotional connection to the story which is simply
about a father and son trying to communicate. Added to that is the lack of an
explanation about Jim's girlfriend, who leaves him at the beginning, and then
does not recognize him later after the past had been changed. A little nod to
"It's A Wonderful Life" to be sure, but the subplot is left dangling like an
unexposed wire in a time machine, and thus she is never seen or heard from
again.

If nothing else, it is a pleasure seeing Dennis Quaid back to his clever, sly,
cocky self - sort of a grown-up version of his character in "Dreamscape." He is
often like a live wire, ready to explode at any moment (the opening sequence
where he survives a fire is followed by Martha Reeves' "Heatwave.") "Frequency"
is too just too low on the voltage meter to follow Quaid's live-wire act. 

For more reviews, check out JERRY AT THE MOVIES at
http://moviething.com/members/movies/faust/JATMindex.shtml 

E-mail me with any questions, comments or general complaints at
[email-masked] or at [email-masked]

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