When James Morosini was about 19 he and his dad got into a huge fight. James ended up blocking all connections to him – phone, email, social media, the works. A few weeks later James got a friend request from a pretty girl on Facebook. “I was thrilled,” James later said in an interview. “She was perfect. We shared the same interests, she was gorgeous… Things were looking up. Unfortunately, she was also my dad.”
Fast forward about a decade after that fight and here’s I Love My Dad, a comedy about what happened when a teenager gets catfished by his own dad, with Morosini in the lightly fictionalised role of Franklin, Patton Oswalt as dad Chuck and Claudia Sulewski as Becca, the young woman whose identity Chuck borrows to make the subterfuge work.
To make the movie work is a little trickier, though Morosini – who writes and directs as well as stars – has come up with a neat trick to make all those online interactions more fun than wading through a lot of text-heavy screengrabs. He dramatises them, in classic “show don’t tell” style. When Franklin communicates with “Becca” or “Becca” with Franklin, Sulewski is there with Morosini, in the car, at the store, in the… er… bathroom, in scenes that both blur the online/offline distinction and make it even more stark.
Sex, is there sex, you’re wondering. A young man, a hot woman, plenty of time on their hands. Morosini handles all this brilliantly, in the movie’s best scenes – icky and conceived at Billy Wilder levels of ingenuity, crossing all sorts of boundaries and taboos as Franklin gets closer to “Becca”, not realising it’s dad at the other end of the interaction.
The casting is brilliant. Morosini is too old – early 30s – to play Franklin, and overdoes the shoegazing and gulping a bit as a result but it’s his story so we wave him through airily without checking his credentials a second time. The other actors are on point – Oswalt is inspired as the useless dad whose lifetime of no-shows and lame excuses have left him high and dry with scant connection to a son he does love… though possibly not as much as he loves himself. Sulewski is entirely plausible as an internet hottie but also charming and likeable as the real Becca, the one who works in the diner where Chuck first came up with the notion of borrowing an identity. Rachel Dratch as Chuck’s latest squeeze, a hot-for-sex co-worker – also great casting. Likewise Lil Rel Howery as Chuck’s techy co-worker who provides useful tell-don’t-show explication here and there and gives us and Chuck the occasional moral steer – “This is incest,” he explains to Chuck at one point, when something particularly weird has gone down.
Moral quagmires notwithstanding, Morosoni doesn’t make it a tract about the new perils of the the digital era. Well, he does, but this film is also alive to the joys and new possibilities opened up by the world online.
Three things. The best laughs – guffaws, howls – come early and should be up there in whatever pantheon there is for the comedy of the inappropriate. Things gradually and slightly disappointingly shift from the icky to the gooey – the double-sided nature of the film is right there in the title. And there’s a brilliant appropriation of some 1940s noir soundtrack at one point, the music doing an awful lot of dramatic work as Franklin’s mother, Diane (Amy Landecker), gets wind of what’s going on and fires the starting pistol on the lead-up to the “oh god, no” finale when everyone is confronted by what’s been going on.
More yuks, especially towards the end, wouldn’t have gone amiss. But you have to take your hat off to Morosini, whose comedy at its best is comedy at its best. What he’s going to do for a follow-up is another matter.
I Love My Dad – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
