Mark Reviews Movies: I LOVE MY DAD

I Love My Dad, Magnolia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 4, 2022

"The following actually happened," says the text at the start of writer/director James Morosini's I Love My Dad, and the next bit of introduction lets us know how the filmmaker knows that: "My dad asked me to tell you it didn't." Morosini opens up quite a bit here, not only making a film about an unbelievably embarrassing episode of his life that also took place during a time of intense vulnerability, but also casting himself as, well, a fictionalized version of himself. In theory, none of this story, in which a father creates a fake personality online in order to communicate with his estranged son, should be funny.

In a twisted way, it is, though, because Morosini knows and embraces just how weird and discomforting this tale actually is. Of course he does. He actually lived it—or at least some version of whatever has been dramatized and fictionalized within his screenplay.

There's a degree of courage here that will probably be overlooked on account of just how strange, uncomfortably funny, and just downright uncomfortable the material is, as well as the way Morosini escalates the whole affair in increasingly squirmy but wholly logical ways. The bravest thing, perhaps, is that the story isn't told or seen from the perspective of Morosini's stand-in, a young man named Franklin. It takes the point of view of the lying, manipulative father, who would be the obvious villain here—except that he doesn't believe that to be the case.

Patton Oswalt plays the dad, named Chuck and clearly a dishonest cheat from the start—when the dad lets a younger Franklin keep a stray dog, only to tear down a flyer announcing that someone has lost the very same puppy. It's good for his kid and almost certainly bad for someone else's, but isn't the first part how any decent parent should think?

It's not exactly that simple, though, and for as much sympathy as the filmmaker inherently displays toward Chuck (That's what makes the focus on his character brave, because there's little reason to have much sympathy for the guy), the man and his deceitful, scheming ways remain something of a mystery. After all, he didn't become like that the one day when he decided to knowingly steal someone else's dog or even when he became a father. Is his plot to pretend to be someone else online really just to have a chance to talk to the son who wants nothing to do with him, or is that just an excuse to fulfill some deeper, compulsive impulse?

The scheme becomes much thornier when one realizes two things about it. First, Chuck pretends to be a beautiful young woman named "Becca," who just happens to be based on a real Becca (Claudia Sulewski), a server at a local diner near his home—more than a day's drive from where Franklin lives with his mother and Chuck's ex-wife Diane (Amy Landecker). Second, Franklin has blocked his father online and in his cellphone on account of a stay in a mental health facility. He attempted suicide, and one step in his recovery is to finally rid himself of the bad influence of and feelings that come from his dishonest, absentee father.

Yes, Chuck is pretty terrible, lying to an emotionally and psychologically vulnerable young man in a way that, if it works, would have some pretty obvious ramifications. It does work, since Franklin is drawn to the pretty woman who sends him a random request on social media (Chuck has used photos of the real Becca as, whether or not—although he probably does—he knows it, a kind of bait).

Soon enough, Chuck's scheme has him having long, intimate chat conversations with his son, who thinks and imagines that "Becca" is an attentive, funny, and sympathetic person (Morosini gets around the abundance of text in these conversations in a simple but clever way: simply having "Becca" appear in front of Franklin to converse in person). Lucky for him (as he sees it, of course), she seems interested in him as a person, a friend, and—maybe, he starts to hope—something more.

Despite and because of the deceit, this is a comedy, although not of errors, because Chuck's actions are too calculating—even when they're improvised—to be mistakes, but of dreadful, uneasy, and inevitable logic. Because Franklin believes "Becca" could be interested in him as more than a friend, Chuck has to reciprocate that notion, as "Becca," to his son. Oswalt's performance is a real tightrope walk, making us believe the genuineness of Chuck's motives, see the underlying compulsion that keeps him lying even when it crosses all sorts of personal lines and father-son boundaries, and maintain the persistent thought that we really shouldn't believe anything of what the man says—even when it comes to the sincerity of his rationale.

For his part, Morosini's performance is hopelessly optimistic, helplessly naïve, and emotionally exposed. Sulewski offers an effortlessly charming and knowingly winking portrayal of a lonely guy's idea of the ideal woman (Her "Becca" walks on water at one point, just to drive that point home). Meanwhile, Lil Rel Howery is dryly funny as Chuck's co-worker, representing the disgust the guy should be feeling and the conscience he's ignoring, and Rachel Dratch plays Chuck's boss/girlfriend, who's into some weird stuff but still knows an obvious line when she sees it.

The film stumbles a bit in the third act, as the running joke takes a turn toward some real consequences, and as ironically satisfying as the final punch line is, this story has nowhere to go or purpose to fulfill after a certain point. Until then, though, I Love My Dad is a smart exercise in progressing the awkward, the comic, and the almost unbearable intersection of them.

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