`Frequency’ tunes in to time travel

In theaters

FREQUENCY. Directed by Gregory Hoblit. Written by Toby Emmerich. Running time: 117 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Audiences interested in seeing Gregory Hoblit’s “Frequency” have a decision to make, one that is either going to make or break their experience of seeing the film.

Before mortgaging the house for the ticket, selling the car for the popcorn and sitting down for the show, they must decide whether they can suspend disbelief for two hours in a film that demands, above all, that they open their minds to one of the year’s more preposterous plots.

In the film, a 36-year-old New York cop in 1999 talks to his firefighter father in 1969. They do this with the help of a shortwave radio, some mystical northern lights that wrap rather conveniently around rooftop antennas and some spectacular sun flares, all of which somehow bend time to bring the two men back together again.

That’s right — back together. You see, 30 years ago, the father, Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid), died while battling a fire, leaving his son, John (Jim Caviezel of “The Thin Red Line”), to be raised by his mother, Julia (Elizabeth Mitchell). Since John now owns and lives in his childhood home, the two men are essentially communicating in the same space with the same ham radio, the only division between them being death and time.

Naturally, the film uses its unique reunion for all it’s worth, wrenching genuine emotion from a conversation most would love to have with a departed loved one.

Imagine being able to speak with your dead mother or father, close friend or relative, and update them on your life, telling them how you’ve triumphed and failed, loved and lost, the mistakes you’ve made, the experiences you’ve learned from.

Now imagine being able to change the course of events that led to their deaths so you could have that loved one back.

It either takes great skill and delicacy to pull something as shaky as this off, or a whole lot of chutzpah. Hoblit opts for chutzpah. He hauls in serial killers and gunfights, people dropping dead and then springing miraculously back to life. He knows the laws of movie time travel and follows them closely in a film that suggests if you tinker with something in the past, it will forever change the present.

How John Sullivan’s present is changed won’t be revealed here, but in spite of some glitches, and one of the more painfully sentimental endings going, it’s mostly an engrossing trip. Quaid and Caviezel are very good, infusing the film’s “Twilight Zone” plot with levity and carrying it off with surprising ease.

Grade: B

On video

ANYWHERE BUT HERE. Directed by Wayne Wang. Written by Alvin Sargent, based on the book by Mona Simpson. Running time: 113 minutes. Rated PG-13.

As mother-daughter movies go, there’s good schmaltz — “Imitation of Life,” “One True Thing,” “Mildred Pierce,” “Gypsy,” “Postcards from the Edge,” “Terms of Endearment” — and there’s bad schmaltz “Stella” (1990), “The Other Sister,” “Hope Floats,” “Stage Mother” and “The Good Mother.”

Wayne Wang’s “Anywhere but Here” is good schmaltz.

Based on Mona Simpson’s acclaimed 1986 best-selling novel, the film is a coming-of-age story about a runaway wife (Susan Sarandon) and her unhappy teen-age daughter (Natalie Portman), both of whom are having growing pains in the midst of a supreme battle of wills. Think of it as a companion piece to Gavin O’Connor’s “Tumbleweeds.”

As Adele August, a middle-aged, small-town sexpot who always thought she was better than her hometown of Bay City, Wis., Sarandon is terrific, pouring on the flamboyant charm while parading about in pedal pushers, big, brassy hair, and even bigger sunglasses.

Determined to break free from Bay City, she quits her husband, quits her family, buys a used Mercedes, uproots her daughter, and heads West to Beverly Hills, where the film recalls Tamara Jenkins’ “The Slums of Beverly Hills” and where this dysfunctional family explores what happens when the daughter is the grown-up and the mother is the child.

In scene after tear-soaked scene, the real surprise is Portman, who more than holds her own opposite Sarandon.

Free of the outlandish hair and inhibiting costumes she wore in “The Phantom Menace,” Portman is at last allowed to act — which she does spectacularly. She’s a natural, giving necessary weight to a film that easily could have become camp without her steady hand to counterbalance Sarandon’s over-the-top — yet nevertheless fun — histrionics.

Grade: B+

Christopher Smith’s reviews appear Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, Tuesday and Thursday on WLBZ’s “NEWS CENTER 5:30 Today” and “NEWS CENTER Tonight,” and Saturday and Sunday on NEWS CENTER’s statewide “Morning Report.”