Frequency Review
by Jerry Saravia (faust668 AT aol DOT com)August 6th, 2001
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.
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