Uncle Frank (Alan Ball, 2020) (Patreon)

Ball gonna Ball. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's mystifying, in a way, that Uncle Frank arrives on global streaming the same week as Happiest Season. Both films are bizarre throwbacks to an era of toxic homophobia, and not just because they depict the struggles of the closet. The Clea DuVall Christmas film is like a cultural timewarp, wherein Kristen Stewart's gay urban academic discovers that the woman to whom she's about to propose (Mackenzie Davis) is secretly some country-club haunting shiksa nightmare from an early 90s Chico's catalog. 

Uncle Frank, meanwhile, takes us back to the late 1960s to show us a gay man from South Carolina (Paul Bettany) who managed to escape the brutal homophobia of his father (Stephen Root), move to New York City, become a lit professor at NYU, and fall in love with Walid (Peter Macdissi), an endlessly charming man from Saudi Arabia. But once Frank has to return to his hometown for any reason, he regresses into a violent embodiment of his father's values, bent not only on self-destruction but also happy to take Walid down with him.

In both films, queer folks are irreparably damaged by shitty upbringings, no matter how hard they work to put distance between those small-town prejudices and their new identities. In this universe, there is no psychotherapy, no reckoning, no healing, only an open wound ready to hemorrhage at the slightest pressure. If Happiest Season is, as Carol Grant observed, a crypto-remake of Get Out, Uncle Frank is a race-reversed Green Book. Once again, white "growth" is foregrounded, only here, the raced queer body is reduced to a jovial punching bag.