Frank and Cindy (G.J. Echternkamp, 2007): US

You might ask how a documentary film about a has-been 80s, one-hit wonder and his enabling wife can be both shockingly raw and hilariously comical. Or at least I did when I read the bio about the documentary film Frank and Cindy, currently playing at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. I must confess I went to see this film on a whim. I was suffering from serious film festival over load. I had seen one too many films about the injustices and harrowing after affects of Nazi war criminals. Frank and Cindy is my guilty pleasure of the festival. It is the directorial debut of G.J. Echternkamp and was featured on Showtime’s This American Life. What’s really interesting about this film is just how real it is. There’s never a false note and what is revealed about this family is crushingly honest and bizarrely cathartic.

Frank is G.J’s step- father, his claim to fame is the hit song “Whirly Girl” which he sang with the now defunct 80s band OXO. Since then he has done pretty much nothing but piss his life and his fortune away, on alcohol, dry cleaning and drugs. The film is at times painfully revealing. It wasn’t hard to take an immediate dislike to Frank. The viewer learns from the get-go about his blatant affairs and his life of self- indulgence. However as the film progresses I could see that Frank was often a willing scapegoat. Cindy is C.J.’s mother she has supported Frank for twenty years. Cindy had dreams of being married to a rock star and going to the Grammy Awards. She constantly berates Frank telling him, “I hate every bone in your fat body.” She has relegated him to the basement where he uses coffee cans as his impoverished bathroom. One day after having a conversation with his parents G.J. decides they are “A Goldmine” and sets out to chronicle their lives.

If you think you know what’s going to happen, trust me you don’t. Frank and Cindy goes places you never expect, uncovering dirty secrets with a large dose of comic relief. From the onset of the film I immediately felt like I knew these people. They are the exaggerated version of the universal dysfunctional family and they seem to laugh through all of it. Cindy is a compulsive liar and lives with the painful regret that she missed out on most of G.J’s childhood, because she was either drunk or on drugs. In a heart- wrenching moment she says, “Love will make you do the most incredible things; things you never thought you could do.” She is referring to her five years of sobriety (not counting a little nip now and then). Cindy is an eccentric mess, she reminds me of Loni Anderson on acid. She is obsessed with her teeth and stole a syringe of collagen from a doctor’s office that she planned to administer herself. Still there is the echo of hope in Cindy. She’s still waiting for her big break and there is something painfully vulnerable about her.

In the hope that Frank might revise his music career Cindy builds him a home studio, where he spends most of his time drinking and smoking. It’s easy to form judgments about these people. They are loud, crass and have swindled and pissed their lives away. Yet somehow you want them to win (or at least I did). And then there is G.J. who you will astound you with his centeredness and accepting nature among all this chaos. Unlike Tarnation (2003) which had a decidedly darker tone, Frank and Cindy is an unsentimental look at life. At a Q & A after the screening G. J. answered questions about the film. The audience was so captured by his story and I dare say by Frank and Cindy. One audience member asked, “What about Frank and Cindy are they still together?” G. J. replied “They’ll always be together. In a weird way they need each other.” Frank and Cindy has been met with such positive reception at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival that G. J. is considering writing a screenplay based on the documentary. I can only hope that Loni Anderson can make room in schedule to play Cindy.