5/09/00 8:55 a.m.
On Frequency
This is a very movie-ish film.

By Rich Lowry, NR Editor-------------------------------------richardlowry@hotmail.com

ever has 1969 looked so good. Frequency is a gauzy Valentine to that year as lived in working-class Queens — back when the World Series still meant something, when rock music was clean, when fathers unabashedly expected their boys to act like men ("spirit and guts" is a kind of mantra in the film).

In Frequency, a rare atmospheric disturbance makes it possible for a son to contact his dad on an old ham radio on the day 30 years earlier when his dad, a firefighter, is about to die on the job. The son tells his dad how to survive the fateful fire at a warehouse, but time is changed in unaccountable ways by his escape. The second half of Frequency becomes a time-travel thriller, with all the logical problems that attend the genre.

This is a very movie-ish film. There is the obligatory dad-trains-son-to-ride-bike scene, a climatic fistfight, and, of course, the firefighter-dad’s dog is a Dalmatian. But if Frequency is schmaltz, it is schmaltz worth wallowing in. Like Field of Dreams, it plucks all the obvious heart-strings, but is moving nonetheless. At bottom, it’s a movie about a father-son connection, made easier by a separation of 30 years. See it if only to sample the nostalgic glories of 1969.