Nathan For You: Finding Frances

Before watching this documentary, I was familiar with Nathan Fielder’s work, who is the director, and one of the film's main subjects. The previous works I had seen included episodes of Nathan For You, the show for which this documentary serves as the series finale, The Rehearsal, and The Curse. I think it is fair to say that Nathan Fielder is an acquired taste, with his signature awkward style, but his comedy fully works for me, and I find myself always engaged, amused, and laughing at everything I see from him. 

Finding Frances demonstrates a turning point in Fielder’s career, where he dives into concepts deeper than ever before. Nathan For You was a meta-comedy show that used reality television tropes as an avenue for Fielder’s commentary and humor to shine. While this is an episode in that same format, the viewer begins to see Fielder branch into themes, concepts, and questions he explores in his more recent work. The practice scene in this “documentary” perfectly demonstrates Fielder’s transformation into this approach, serving as a practice for what he will dive deeper into his television series The Rehearsal. 

The grander interesting themes that are explored throughout this work are present but secondary to the main storyline of William Heath searching for a long-lost high school sweetheart. At the center of the story, the film tackles themes of loneliness, longing, and regret through the focus on William’s perspective. These themes culminate in a gut-wrenching scene of a fifteen-minute phone call between the Bill Gates impersonator and his high school girlfriend Frances, where she does not initially recognize his voice, and William is forced to take off his nostalgia-tinted glasses and face the reality that he is holding onto something from the past that cannot be accessed now. 

While William is going on his journey that tackles these themes, Nathan is also directly involved in his own documentary and goes through his own arc. I view this work as a meta-commentary and meta-documentary that deals with performance, relationship to the camera, and the questioning of the practices of modern television documentaries. The film directly attempts the usual television documentary tropes, demonstrated in the way the film is structured, but the awkward and peculiar subject matter and main characters form a comedic commentary that forces the viewer to question the reality and practice of this style of content. Nathan’s perspective throughout the entire documentary forces the viewer to confront questions that form through the film’s practices and concepts. 

The perspective of Nathan Fielder launches this work above the prototypical television documentary and creates a wonderful conversation piece on filmmaking, persona, and reality that works if you buy into Fielder’s style and conform to his witty perspective. Due to my enjoyment of the humor and the questions and discussion the content creates, I give this documentary a thumbs up.