From Sundance: A Biting Comedy Whose Voiceovers Co

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From Sundance: A Biting Comedy Whose Voiceovers Co

From Sundance: A Biting Comedy Whose Voiceovers Come Via Twitter

Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Fassbender (in the papier-mâché head), and Domhnall Gleeson star in Frank. Photo: Lorey Sebastian/Courtesy Sundance Institute

* PARK CITY, Utah — For years films have used voiceovers to clue the audience in about backstory and secrets that aren’t directly revealed on-screen. Director Lenny Abrahamson’s movie Frank, which premiered at the ongoing Sundance Film Festival, catapults that concept into the future by giving it a social media twist; instead of using traditional voice narration to add backstory, the film simply uses the protagonist’s tweets, which are posted directly on the screen.

It’s the perfect format for a flick like Frank, a dryly funny and ultimately heart-wrenching yarn about an overly ambitious musician named Jon who joins a band called Soronprfbs. The unpronounceable group is led by the enigmatic Frank (Michael Fassbender), a song-writing whiz who wears a papier-mâché head at all times, even in the shower. Always looking to self-promote on Twitter (and YouTube), Jon documents his musical journey with the group through his droll tweets, which appear complete with overly long self-indulgent hashtags.

“Twitter … [provided] a connection to this kind of self-promotional web thing and also the capacity to have a voiceover… that isn’t a straight VO,” Abrahamson said. “What’s great is to have the sound of social media self-presentation: trying to be funny and trying to make yourself sound a lot more interesting than you are, which is what everybody does online.”

Jon’s social media binges end up playing a pivotal role in the story, and the device of onscreen tweets allows Abrahamson to simultaneously reveal his internal monologue along with a whole other facet of Jon’s personality: his online persona. While there is some standard voiceover, but even that is presented in Jon’s online voice, and accompanied by clacking keys to indicate he’s blogging or typing out some other online missive.

‘What starts to take over is that obsessive checking of [Twitter] … where you’re thinking, ‘How am I playing in this drama?’ rather than just living it.’

— Lenny Abrahamson

The story will feel resonant for anyone who has followed eccentric members of a band on social media and wondered if they were really that interesting, or just making their lives seem wonderful with Instagram-filtered photos and enigmatic hashtags. In the case of Jon, he’s actually surrounded by genuine creativity and fascinating personalities, but chooses to sell them short by reducing them to weird Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr blurbs.

It’s a biting commentary on how creativity becomes commodified in the internet age, an idea that felt particularly resonant for Abrahamson as promoted his movie at Sundance, a festival where love of film can sometimes get lost in the midst of all the hype.

“What starts to take over is that obsessive checking out of where you are, what the perception is, following Twitter to find out what people are saying about your film,” Abrahamson said. “[It's] the neutralization of your life in favor of a kind of instrumentalized version of yourself where you’re thinking, ‘How am I playing in this drama?’ rather than just living it.”

So is this metatexual commentary the reason Abrahamson cast Fassbender – a highly successful, highly recognizable actor at the top of his game – and then hid his A-list face in a giant head? Partly, yes. Originally, Abrahamson considered casting an unknown, but went with Fassbender because having someone super-famous play a largely unseen character drove home one of the main points of his film: the importance of genuine talent versus hype.

“For me, the idea of disabling that persona – that face, which is the thing – and allowing Fassbender to exist humanly in a very different way seemed to fit thematically with all of those ideas,” said Abrahamson.