By Ty Burr
What do you do when life hands you lemons? You make lemonade, of course.
What do you do when life hands you a mind-bendingly humiliating and emotional trauma involving yourself, your father and the internet? You make a movie about it.
“I Love My Dad” premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March and won both the jury prize and the audience award for best narrative feature – pretty remarkable for a movie most audiences watch through their fingers while screaming in embarrassment.
The second feature film from writer-director-star James Morosini (“Threesomething”) is an ink-black comedy about Franklin, a brooding young man played by the film-maker, who has cut off all communication with his unreliable screw-up of a father, Chuck, played by actor-comedian Patton Oswalt.
Desperate to connect, the father creates a fake Facebook account and, under the guise of Becca (Claudia Sulewski), a willowy and sympathetic woman Franklin’s age, establishes a relationship with his son that can’t help veering into oh-no-they-didn’t/oh-my-god-they-did territory.
It sounds like a tabloid headline or the title of a particularly unseemly Subreddit: I Got Catfished By My Own Father.
Yet “I Love My Dad”, which opened in theatres on Friday and whose title points in at least two directions, is more than just a one-joke cringefest.
On the contrary, it goes to some honest and movingly real places in the eternal struggle between parent and child – while simultaneously making you want to rinse your eyeballs with lye.
Worst of all? (Or best, depending on how much you're into Schadenfreude.) This really happened to James Morosini.
Speaking recently by Zoom from his home in Los Angeles, the lanky film-making triple threat, 32, ’fesses up.
“When I was around 20 years old, I got in a big fight with my dad and I decided in kind of 20-year-old fashion that I was going to cut him out, that I was done with him. Blocked him on Facebook, changed his name in my phone to Do Not Answer.
“And I got home one day and this really pretty girl sent me a friend request on Facebook, and she had all the same interests as me and all these great pictures. I got really excited, and I started to feel kind of better about myself.
“My self-esteem started to improve. And then I found out that it was my dad, and he created this thing as a way of making sure I was okay.”
And how long did the deception last? “Longer than I wish it had, I’ll say.”
At the same time, Morosini says the social media disaster led to an odd sort of reckoning between father and son.
“It forced our relationship to hit this rock bottom that allowed an experience of honesty to start being more important in our relationship. And that’s what the film is about in a lot of ways. How are we honest in our relationships? And what does it mean to be closer to somebody if you’re getting closer to them in a dishonest way?”