'FRANKIE' ADRIFT IN GLOOM.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

BRITISH miserablist films can be powerful when they tell us something worth knowing about human nature. When they're primarily button-pushing, sentimental mysteries, like the well-acted but downbeat ``Dear Frankie'' is, the payoff isn't worth the angst of getting to it.

There's a difference between the way ``Frankie's'' director, Shona Auerbach, and, say, Mike Leigh work the concept of parents lying to children in their teary little films. Leigh wants us to empathize and reorder our moral judgment, but Auerbach is after simpler responses such as pity and confidence that good things will eventually happen to good people.

Young, glum single mum Lizzie (Emily Mortimer, who was so vibrant in ``Young Adam'' and ``Lovely & Amazing'') keeps dragging her own elderly mother (Mary Riggans) and deaf, 9-year-old boy Frankie (Jack McElhone) from apartment to crummy apartment in the port city of Greenock. She's obviously on the run from somebody, and it's not too hard to figure out whom when we discover the well-intentioned trick she's playing on little Frankie.

Seems Lizzie has convinced the boy that his long-absent father is a merchant seaman. She keeps the charade up by writing letters in his father's hand, and contriving to have them mailed with stamps and postmarks from exotic ports-of-call. The notes Frankie ``sends'' back also work for Lizzie as a window into the soul of a child she can otherwise barely communicate with.

Problems arise when Frankie becomes excited to learn that the ship his imaginary dad is on will soon dock in Greenock. Desperate, Lizzie arranges to hire a real sailor to impersonate a loving father for her fragile boy for a few days. Known only as The Stranger, he is played by ``The Phantom of the Opera's'' Gerard Butler, who mercifully (not that Frankie would mind, but for us) does not sing.

Anyway, the inevitable happens. Stranger proves to be good natural parent material, and even though she's drabbed down to an unconscionable extent, Lizzie still looks like Emily Mortimer. But there is the matter of that white, years-long lie, as well as the person Lizzie so dreads, in the way of big happy family creation.

Despite the three principals' best, hard-knocked efforts, ``Dear Frankie'' can't overcome the plotting first/character second nature of Andrea Gibb's screenplay. The pain and neediness that are hallmark virtues of this saddening but necessary genre have little heft when the main business is one of keeping the game up, not exposing secrets and lies for the damaging things that they are. A final twist, meant to make you leave the theater smiling, rather calls further into question why you would open your heart up to ``Dear Frankie'' at all.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

DEAR FRANKIE - Two and one half stars

(PG-13: language, children in jeopardy)

Starring: Emily Mortimer, Gerard Butler, Jack McElhone.

Director: Shona Auerbach.

Running time: 1 hr. 45 min.

Playing: ArcLight, Hollywood; NuWilshire, Santa Monica.

In a nutshell: A Scottish mother lies to her young son about his long-missing sailor father, then has to hire a fake daddy when the ship comes in. Questionable premise, dreary execution.

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Emily Mortimer and Gerard Butler dance around the truth to spare a little boy disappointment in ``Dear Frankie.''