FREQUENCY
by Sasha Stone

Before Kevin Costner's Field of Dreams opened, the buzz was that the general audience wouldn't buy the premise of a farmer hearing a voice in the corn to plow out his cornfield: "If you build it, he will come." When it turned out that "he" was not Shoeless Joe, but the farmer's long-dead father, the film took off by word of mouth, became a huge hit, and a new genre was born: baby boomer nostalgia.

Boomer nostalgia celebrates the Norman Rockwellian ideal of a dreamy kid who wants to be a baseball star, comes home to mom for some chocolate cookies, then learns how to ride a bike from dad. In some ways, it is our collective memory of America gone by, when mothers weren't burning their bras and dads weren't taking Viagra and running off with a bimbo, and when baseball meant more than the explosive salary of its stars. This America probably didn't exist in reality, but that won't stop it from becoming a cinematic genre, and therefore, basically real.

Of course, there is much guilt tied up in this boomer nostalgia, like "I never appreciated my father," "If only I hadn't been afraid to tell my dad I loved him," which explains why these films are so effective - they give the mournful a second chance.

Carrying on in the tradition of Field of Dreams, with a little of The Sixth Sense and Back to the Future thrown in, is Gregory Hoblit's time-travel thriller, Frequency.

A cop, Johnny Sullivan (Jim Caviezel) finds life a little too complicated lately - in addition to being a brooding sort of guy, his girlfriend has just walked out on him because he "won't change." However, everything is about to change for Johnny when he gets his hands on his father's old ham radio. Suddenly, a firefighter named Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid) is talking to his son in the future. Never mind the particulars, something to do with the aurora borealis, which hovers majestically behind the Sullivan house, in both future and past.

Johnny can't believe he's talking to his father, Frank can't believe he's talking to his son, but just in case, Johnny warns Frank to "go the other way" in a deadly fire he's about to fight, thus saving his dad's life. Saving his dad's life, it turns out, isn't so simple. A grand disruption has taken place and everything's changed.

The idea is that our past and present exist concurrently on separate frequencies, if you will. When the past is changed, it alters things in other, unexpected ways. Namely, that Frank's chance to live out his life rather than die prematurely inadvertently frees a serial killer to go out and kill many more women than he would have originally, including Johnny's mother.

Now, the film becomes a heart-stopping thriller where both men try to fix what they've accidentally broken. It isn't just the events that change, however. Each time something alters an event, it changes the insides of the people involved - Johnny feels the memory of his mother's death implanted in his brain just as he feels the memory of his father living a lot longer.

Having his father die is one thing, the change in him in marginal. Having his mother die changes a lot more in Johnny. He's suddenly "difficult" to deal with at work. Johnny perseveres, continuing to work with his father, who is getting into some serious trouble back in 1968.

A lot of information is thrown at you in act three, resulting in some confusion as to the facts. But if you can shut down that part of your brain that continually asks - but what about this? and what about that? - you might find yourself caught up in the emotional drama swirling around this happy little family.

Indeed, it is the connection between father and son that ultimately saves Frequency. Hoblit never forgets how important the acting is. In his 1996 thriller, Primal Fear, he turned a mediocre script into a captivating thriller with a performance of a then unknown Ed Norton. Hoblit is nearly as good with Quaid, giving the actor a chance to show a tough-guy vulnerability usually reserved for the king, Harrison Ford.

As Satch, the family friend of Frank and now partner of Johnny, Homicide's Andre Braugher seems slightly confused as to what and who he should be. Alas, the very fine actor is, as usual, underused. However, Shawn Doyle hits it on the head as the evil serial killer, Jack Shepard.

Ultimately, Frequency is about love, loyalty, baseball, dad, mom, and, of all things, Yahoo stock. It spits you back out onto the street wondering about your own life - what would you change if you had the chance to talk to your dad over a ham radio in 1968? How many people could you save? How would your own future be altered by it?

Just as with any other film that deals with the concurrent past/future, you'll drive yourself crazy if you think about it too much. Asking too many questions will reveal too many holes in the plot, not intentional holes, but unintentional ones that come from a screenplay that is an open, rather than closed, system.

Certainly, it would be easy to hate this film, to walk out on its cornball sensibilities, to rage against its silly, narcissistic, unbelievable premise. It is far more courageous, however, to give yourself over to a little boy's imagination, a little boy who just wanted to talk to his dad again after all these years.