Forgiving the Franklins - a film review

First full disclosure: The director of this film, Jay Floyd, is a dear friend and it is populated with actors I shamelessly adore both professionally and personally. That said: Forgiving the Franklins, which premiered at Sundance last week, is a delight.
A delight that brings up profound questions.

The Franklins are seemingly the perfect Norman Rockwell American Family. Frank Franklin (Robertson Dean) toils at a conservative law firm as the breadwinner. Betty (Teresa Willis) is a homemaker who worries about the right ingredients for her church bake sale cake, Brian (Vince Pavia) is forever the good son, who strives to impress his high school football coach, and Caroline (Aviva) is the perfect cheerleading daughter who is, of course, overly concerned about her weight.

I will not write a plot outline here. But I will say this: quite suddenly an event occurs that changes Peggy, Frank and Brian utterly. Though initially they seem only to have suspicions that something is quite different. Caroline, however, sees the change immediately - and is appalled and confused. Floyd posits a deceptively simple question in this film: What if the apple in the garden of Eden was "unbit" and the idea of Original Sin disappeared overnight for 3 members of an American family?

What follows in the lives of the Franklins, and the southern town they live in, is hilarious, moving, confrontational, and the one thing too many big budget films run from: truly thought provoking. Often all at once.

It is a kind of sport at Sundance to walk out of films. Especially ones with no stars or Hollywood powers involved. At the screening last Friday I saw no one leave. In fact, for the Q and A afterward the house remained packed. A professor from an Christian evangelical college, surrounded by 50 of his students was in tears as he addressed Mr. Floyd. I will say this much about the plot: evangelical Christians do not come off well in Forgiving the Franklins. Which is why they should see it - and probably won't.

One scene that must be mentioned: When Betty and Frank rediscover - or rather discover - each other in the bedroom after years of sex by the numbers Forgiving the Franklins becomes glorious. American films will show us anything but this: a husband and wife making love. It is here we come to see the central message: the price exacted by societies' repressions is paid for by removing intimacy - with others and ourselves. No punches are pulled with nudity - but there is nothing pornographic. There is, however, something rarely rendered in a sex scene: maturity and joy. The unabashed joy of 2 adults enjoying the full power of their sexuality.

Floyd's vision is hilarious and tender, forceful and compassionate. Forgiving the Franklins is love letter to anyone hungry to be more fully alive, and a frontal assault on those who would repress.

You will laugh - until you cry.