I Love My Dad: From Deadbeat Parent to (Ugh) Online Lover

By Liam Lacey

Rating: C

A cringey indie sitcom that won Grand Jury and Audience awards at the SXSW festival earlier this year, I Love My Dad isn’t much without Patton Oswalt.

The veteran comedian plays Chuck, an estranged dad who uses a fake social media account to get far too close to his depressed and suicidal 20-something son. The son, Franklin, is played by writer-director James Morosini (Threesomething) who based the story on his personal experience with his father, which he has decided to frame as a comedy rather than a trauma memoir.

After a string of voice messages chronicle Chuck’s history of missing birthdays, graduations, and promised vacations, we meet the emotionally numb Franklin, a 20-something man who’s in therapy after a suicide attempt.

Franklin, jobless and friendless, lives with his hovering mom (Amy Landecker), but he’s made one positive step in his life. Having determined that his father’s compulsive dishonesty is toxic, he blocks Chuck on social media and refuses to answer his phone calls.

Chuck — a kind schlubbier, cuddlier version of Robert De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin from The King of Comedy — can’t take “get lost” for an answer. Taking a cue from his co-worker Jimmy (Lil Rel Howery), who once stalked an ex-girlfriend online, Chuck decides to catfish his own son, setting up a fake social media account and using the name and picture of a local diner’s kind young waitress, Becca (Claudia Sulewski).

Through the online avatar of Becca, Chuck is soon engaging Franklin in late-night chats, scenes in which the actual young attractive young woman appears to be sitting next to Franklin or popping up next to him at the grocery store.

What begins as a theoretically benign attempt at monitoring his son’s mental health and bolstering his confidence takes an increasingly creepy and absurd direction as the movie progresses. Chuck even persuades a hyper-sexual co-worker that he’s dating (Rachel Dratch) to participate in a “prank” by pretending to be Becca on the phone.

Chuck, caught up in the fiction he has created, decides to take Franklin on a road trip to bond with his son, purportedly to meet the fictitious girlfriend. Under the fake Becca’s warm guidance, Franklin gains confidence, applies for a job, and learns to drive… and begins to forgive and appreciate his father.

Predictably, the vulnerable Franklin falls hard for his father’s avatar of Becca. This leads us to the Farrelly-style gross-out scene where Chuck is sexting with his son from the next room, while Franklin, in the bathroom, is vividly imagining he and Becca in a sexual encounter. The movie never really recovers.

What works as edgy comedy is determined by what you can get away with. Having introduced depression and virtual incest, I Love My Dad just isn’t adroit enough to find a credible happy ending escape hatch. Too much of Chuck’s conduct is too calculating to come across as fumbling and misjudged, and instead seems sadistic, punishing his mentally fragile son, who had rejected him, for a crushing disappointment. The festival awards aside, audiences are likely to be less tolerant of Chuck’s behaviour than the forgiving filmmaker would like us to be.

I Love My Dad. Written and directed by James Morosini. Starring Patton Oswalt, James Morosini, Claudia Sulewski, Rachel Dratch, Amy Landecker and Lil Rel Howery. In theatres August 5.