FRANK & CINDY

If someone wanted to make a convincing argument against narrative film then G.J. Echternkamp’s documentary Frank & Cindy would be a prime piece of supporting evidence. After all, why would a filmmaker bother inventing characters when people like these are running around? The film’s title refers to Echternkamp’s parents, an unruly pair of true eccentrics whose marriage is the subject of this hilarious, horrifying and infinitely well-made documentary.

His mother, Cindy, is a thin blonde woman, pretty damn sexy for sixty, with a sailor’s mouth and a touch of the Grey Gardens about her. GJ’s stepfather Frank, twenty years Cindy’s junior, is an overweight drunk who enjoyed a brief success in the early 80’s with his pop-rock band OXO. Now he lives in Cindy’s basement, peeing into coffee cans and constantly swearing off of the alcohol he imbibes furiously. Echternkamp is both cameraman and leading man, simultaneously a curious outsider and the glue that holds this nontraditional family unit together.

Cindy is one of the most complex women ever committed to screen. She loves her son with a fierceness that often moves her to tears and she bitterly regrets the traumas of his childhood. She claims to despise her husband, announcing “I hate every fat bone in your body.” (In one of the films funniest moments Frank responds to her vitriol. “Stop looking at me with those teeth.”) Yet for all Cindy’s bluster and her fervently stated desire to change, her life stays remarkably the same. Echternkamp filmed his folks for nearly a year but what emerges is not a story of transformation. It is a lovingly thorny and extremely still portrait of an imperfect matriarch and the man she loves to hate.

Frank & Cindy is tightly edited and wonderfully trim, benefiting from a bouncy score provided by Frank himself. Echternkamp’s camerawork isn’t slick but what it lacks in focus it makes up for in startling intimacy. His subjects clearly love and trust him. Frank occasionally resents the intrusiveness of the camera but continues to allow himself to be filmed, in large part because of Cindy’s insistence that it is the best thing they can do for their son’s career. She firmly believes that their marital high jinks will put Echternkamp on the map as a filmmaker. She is right.