Dear Frankie is a 2004 British drama film directed by Shona Auerbach and starring Emily Mortimer, Gerard Butler, Jack McElhone, and Sharon Small.

Newly relocated in the Scottish town of Greenock, Lizzie accepts a job at the local fish and chips shop owned by a friendly woman named Marie, and enrolls Frankie in school.

Through a Glasgow post office box, Frankie maintains a regular correspondence with someone he believes to be his father, Davey, who allegedly is a merchant seaman working on HMS Accra.

They spend a day together (with Lizzie secretly following them), collecting on Frankie's bet at a soccer match from a school mate, ordering chips, and later in the evening setting up another half-day visit.

The letter also indicates that Frankie intends to carry on with his life, telling about his real dad passing, his friends and their gold stars in school, and getting onto the reserve football team.

[1] The screenplay originated as a script for a 15-minute short submitted to producer Caroline Wood, who had requested writing samples from potential screenwriters for what would be Auerbach's film debut after several years of directing commercials.

The bold long shot near the end of Dear Frankie allows the film to move straight as an arrow toward its emotional truth, without a single word or plot manipulation to distract us".

[She] has resurrected Butler's career ... and gotten an unforgettable performance from Mortimer ... Jack McElhone seems to be a natural, the kind of child actor you can't wait to have grow up to see what he'll be able to do then".

[11] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone rated the film three out of four and commented, "What could have been a sentimental train wreck emerges as a funny and touching portrait of three bruised people ...

"[13] Carina Chocano of the Los Angeles Times stated the film "nestles comfortably in that Scottish-Celtic niche of cozy, overcast, working-class fairy tales that seem to smell faintly of fried fish and beer ... Not that Dear Frankie aspires to any kind of hardened realism.

On the contrary, it caters to a particular type of Anglophile fantasy, the kind where the china doesn't match and the chintz is dingy, but people look out for one another and love sprouts easily in the humidity ... [Its] surprises are few and low-key, but the story wraps up nicely.

[14] In the Tampa Bay Times, Steve Persall graded the film B and added, "Auerbach and screenwriter Andrea Gibb handle these circumstances with such understated grace that sap becomes special.

Despite occasional flickers of a fairy-tale ending, Auerbach ultimately resists the temptation, maintaining the realism and integrity that give this thoughtful feature its bittersweet charm".

"[18] In his review in The New York Times, Stephen Holden called the film "a heaping bowl of Scottish blarney", a "manipulative tearjerker", and "a fraudulent yarn riddled with plot holes and improbabilities and topped by a cynical final twist that pulls the rug out from under the story".