It’s been a long road to release for Frankie & Alice, a drama starring Halle Berry and Stellan Skarsgard. The project is set to hit theaters next Friday, April the fourth, a full four years after being completed. That’s a weird story in its own right – a movie actually seeing theatrical release four years after completion, never mind the fact that it sports two stars in the leading roles. Never mind that one of them was nominated for a Golden Globe in 2011 after the movie briefly ran in Los Angeles in late 2010. What? Yes, Halle Berry was among the Best Actress – Drama nominees at the Golden Globes three years ago. She was the fifth in a formidable field that sported Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone), Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole), Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine), and winner Natalie Portman (Black Swan).
So why has this movie muddled through nothingness for so long? Well, although Rotten Tomatoes is hardly the final reckoning on a movie’s quality, particularly when aggregating only 14 reviews, Frankie & Alice currently stands at just 14%, with an average rating of about 2 out of 5. Ouch. And bizarre, given the Globe nod for Berry.
But hope springs eternal, and perhaps, too, redemption cometh and that right soon with some added judgment. The story, for the record, follows Berry as an exotic dancer who has multiple personality disorder, with Skarsgard as the therapist who takes pity on her. It certainly looks to us like a tardy attempt to capture twice the lightning of Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, but you be the judge:
Frankie & Alice was directed by Geoffrey Sax, who saw some success with the horror film White Noise in 2005 before being pinned to Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker. We’ll be able to see if he’s created another indie standout, or if there really was a reason no distributor would touch this, when it hits theaters April 4.
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