John Stanley
BY JOHN STANLEY
There's nothing harder than writing a good mystery thriller full
of clever twists and a few O. Henry-type surprises that haven't
been done to death already. Try it sometime if you think it's
easy to avoid cliches and stereotypes. Try to come up with fresh
suspenseful sequences, attention-holding characters, and all
those other pieces of cinematic business that put an audience
on the edge of its seats. It's a matter of concoction and contrivance,
but concoction and contrivance that's clever, that isn't obvious
or calls attention to itself as just plain lousy plotting.
Let's face it: Most movie mysteries follow tried-and-true formulae, and rare is the constructionist who decides to spin away from the familiar and plunge into unique territory. That's why there are so many unproduced screenplays floating around Hollywood, especially ones that copycat successful genre product.
"Frequency" struck me as a movie that achieves its uniqueness by taking a fresh approach to the "time travel" story and mixing it up with elements of more familiar movie stuff: The serial murderer (dubbed by the press the Nightingale Killer) and the baffled but hard-working cop who's working the case and finds his personal life getting all mixed up with his quest for the killer.
There have been so many of these movies in recent years, produced in the wake of "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Seven," that it's hard to imagine there is any refreshing way left to tell it.
Screenwriter Toby Emmerich came up with some unusual ideas about time displacement and how changes in the past will affect events in the future, thus making "Frequency" an above-average fantasy-thriller. It's an old variation on the plot that if you go into the past and kill Adolf Hitler's father as a boy, that will prevent World War II.
Time paradoxes have been put to good use in adaptations of H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine" and subsequent imitations, but usually main characters travel through the time stream into the past or the future. However, in "Frequency" none of the characters leave their respective time zones. Instead, two men talk to each other over a short-wave radio, one living in 1969, the other in modern times.
"Frequency" is not a perfect movie by any means and there are some convenient coincidences in the plotting of the serial-killer mystery, but I nevertheless appreciated Emmerich's attempt to give me something different. He also succeeds in blending in a father-and-son relationship that touches a strong emotional chord, and he conveys a sense that family is an important part of our lives that we shouldn't take for granted.
Subtly tucked away as a subplot is a message that smoking cigarettes will kill you. That's a lot to pack into 117 minutes, but Emmerich does it well and he kept my interest with his unusually constructed tale.
It starts in 1969 with fireman Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid) involved in some spectacular disaster scenes and coming out a hero. He's established as a happy home guy, and that happens to include a son named John.
Cut to modern day as that son is now contemporary cop John Sullivan (Jim Caviezel), assigned to solve the Nightingale killings. One night he hooks up his long-dead father's ham-radio set at a time when the Aurora Borealis is causing some freakish atmospheric conditions involving sunspots. Apparently this little-elaborated-on weather anomaly causes a distortion in time and space and allows son to John to talk to his deceased father, who's back in 1969 right after that heroic rescue he performed, also talking into his radio receiver.
Being able to convey knowledge of the past to someone in the past, so steps can be taken to cancel out negative events and bring about positive results, provides "Frequency" with its fantasy concept. If something different is done in the past to distort the time line, that chance occurs now in the present.
That concept is visually exciting when a man is being strangled in one time zone and in another time zone the attacker's hand is being blown away by a shotgun blast. We see the hand disappearing from the man's neck, thereby saving his life -- a great suspense device.
Emmerich's plot also allows for a most unusual relationship to develop, since Frank died 30 years ago and left a large void in son John's life. Now father and son have a chance to repair the rift. First, son gives father the information he needs to avoid dying in a warehouse fire. However, in changing that part of the time line they also create some unexpected changes in the Nightingale murders that have placed Son's mother/Frank's wife in jeopardy. Neat twist.
So, now with the short-wave radio device John can keep his father up to date on things that are about to happen. With some luck, Frank can prevent further murders and capture the Nightingale. Meanwhile, the Nightingale Killer, in the modern time zone, realizes John is getting close to his identity and is closing in. In the other time line, the younger killer is closing in on father Frank. More neat twists.
This isn't "time travel" as it's portrayed in most fantasy movies, but it's a fascinating variation. "Frequency" is that rare creature--a good murder mystery with just enough of the time-distortion thing to satisfy genre fans. It's about time we had "Frequency."
© 2000 by John Stanley
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