Dear Frankie is a really interesting drama from Scotland. This is a very important to note because we know that if it were remade in the US, the story would have been slightly different and definitely more predictable.
The basic storyline is that a boy Frankie is constantly moving with his mother and grandmother. His father doesn't live with him and his mother tells him that this is because his father works on a ship that travels around the world. Frankie writes letters to his father and ""his father"" writes back to him. In reality, his mother responds to the letters. This charade catches up to her when Frankie makes a bet with a classmate that Frankie's father will visit when his ship arrives in town (this was a bit of poor planning on the mother's part...she thought she had made up the name of the ship, but there was a real ship by that name and it is scheduled to arrive in town).
Ok...so you can now see that the mother has to ""invent"" a father. In an American movie, you'd see at least 10 mins of her doing silly things to meet men to be the "father for the day". In this movie, they show her trying to get one, but honestly...they move along. How she obtains the "father" is not a significant portion of the movie at all. Of course, the father ends up really liking Frankie and the mother ends up attracted to him too (sheesh...CoralGoose, SallyGoose and OpalGoose were also drooling through the second half of the movie - this guy was hot!!!). Of course, in an American movie, the mother would have tried to keep the father figure guy around for the rest of her life. But interestingly enough, the movie takes a whole different direction that we didn't predict (and can't tell you about because it'd wreck the movie for you!).
Throughout the movie, you get more clues about the mother and son's past. It culminates in the final 5-10 mins of the movie when you feel like "ah, now I get it". It's at that moment that we had to share a box of kleenex...CoralGoose and SallyGoose were just honking and tossing kleenex while OpalGoose held the box and CarsonGoose ran around picking up the discards.
Golly...if we told you anymore, you wouldn't need to see the movie. Just trust us, if you like Romantic Dramas, you'll love this one. Another tiny hint, we turned on the English subtitles because there were a few words we didn't hear. Turns out, we didn't know these words at all! They sing some songs with words we've never heard of. Most of the dialog is standard English, but we think there were a few slang words or maybe non-English words that we just didn't get.
GooseRating: a rare 10 of 10 happy honks from the entire gaggle!