(2003) Director Shona Auerbach's intimate film has a huge heart without becoming mawkish or predictable.

Nine-year-old Frankie Morrison (Jack McElhone), who's deaf and resists wearing a hearing aid or speaking (but "a champion lip reader" and capable student whose favorite subject is geography), lives with his mother Lizzie (Emily Mortimer) and his nana (Mary Riggans). After yet another change of residence, the family settles down in Glasgow, Scotland.

Frankie writes letters to his dad (of whom he has no remembrance) aboard the HMS Accra and eagerly awaits replies, often accompanied by postage stamps from around the world; he keeps track of the ship's progress on a world map tacked to his bedroom wall above his bed. The letters from his dad are actually fabrications written by his mother.

A classmate, Ricky Munroe, hands Frankie a newspaper announcing the expected arrival in port of the HMS Accra and bets Frankie that his dad won't be on the ship. Frankie wagers his stamp collection and a knife against Ricky. When Lizzie reads Frankie's letter to his dad of the bet, she becomes frantic. Her mother Nell advises: "Tell Frankie the truth."

Instead Lizzie searches the bars for a stranger, someone to play Dad for a Day, without luck. After Marie (Sharon Small), her friend and employer, finds Lizzie sitting distraught on a bench, she suggests someone - without past, present, or future - for the role.

Following a meeting with Lizzie, the stranger (Gerard Butler) accepts the arrangement (with payment) to become Davey Morrison temporarily on shore leave. A complicating factor appears in a newspaper article Nell reads of the real Davey Morrison's sister Janet looking for her brother's missing wife.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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