The father, adapted from director Florian Zeller’s 2012 award-winning play, gives Anthony Hopkins a role designed to almost break your heart: a role full of anger, displacement and uncertainty, but also flashes of humor, a lively liveliness. Reminders of who this man once was.
This is a film about dementia. He quickly arrives in the wake of Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth led supernova, in which a writer facing an early dementia looks to the future and sees only desolation, a loss of everything that makes him who he is. The father is, as the title might suggest, about an older man, Anthony (played by Hopkins), who lives precisely the future supernova seems to have in mind. It is a film about a man whose condition left him vulnerable: to his confusion, to a growing lack of independence and, finally, to time itself.
When the movie starts, Anthony is in trouble. Her daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman), learned that her father had alienated another nurse. She gave up. Anthony apparently called her a “little bitch,” reports Anne, and physically threatened her. Before that nurse, there were three others. This is a matter of increasing urgency. Anne has a life to live. She moved her father to her apartment to keep an eye on him (given the frequency with which he is passing by nurses …), but the situation is no longer sustainable. However, she feels, she cannot abandon him.
Of course, conflicts arise. The father it has to do with living with dementia as well as with the afflicted as with taking care of such a person and, in the process, seeing the slow weakening of his senses over time. It is about the feeling of seeing – from the outside, from the inside – an inexplicable tear in the fabric of a man’s reality. Zeller’s presumption for drama it takes the adventurous, potentially even human, step of making us experience all of this from Anthony’s perspective. Which means: time, in this film, is a membrane. And the drama that unfolds there is full of memory lapses, confusions of identity, confusing confusion of place and event. Anthony is a man who needs stability to make sense of his life.
Denial is also a necessary ingredient. “I don’t need anyone,” says Anthony more than once. He also tells them to fuck themselves. His personality vibrates and changes – a personality that seems to have been fun, complicated in the first place. These moods now turn more often towards wickedness, even wickedness. A new nurse, Laura (Imogen Poots), arrives and Anthony gives a kind of show, becomes a real charm factory – attracting her before killing her. There may have been an error in trying to hide that the woman is a nurse. Despite his condition, Anthony
Her apartment – a beautiful design feat, courtesy of Peter Francis, which is enhanced by theatrical lighting, a visually imposed feeling of comfort at one moment and isolation at the next – is a sanctuary. The same is true with private objects, private memories. Another daughter, a watch. But the film’s emphasis is on its memory lapses, its confusions of time, its confusions of identity. His life is full of disorienting confusions of place and event. Part of this is not just a matter of your mind: in fact, there are changes taking place in your life. But the film’s central effort, sometimes effectively, sometimes programmatically, is to literalize this confusion.
The actors (whose ranks are filled by Rufus Sewell, Mark Gatiss and Olivia Williams) seem to switch roles. Or is this Anthony’s confusion? The rooms presented in a way, in one scene, seem to change. Within this complex structure is a whirlwind of feelings anchored by Colman, whose pain is high despite a performance based on silence, and Hopkins, whose aged and perceptive Anthony proves to be too human. What is clear at the end of the film is that it must have been something to see on stage, where the confusions of the man’s mind must have been even more disorienting and destabilizing. As for the film: your sincerity should not be doubted. The first time I watched it, I was bothered by its tricks, which fall forward, disturbing us in a way that sometimes seems disturbing because it is so open, so literal.
A second screening was more moving, although sometimes the film is still delayed under the weight of its presumption, coming out less as an act of sympathy from the perspective than as a trick being played on the public – not to mention everyone the actor’s tricks. Oscar rolls will certainly sizzle. The ending, depending on you, may seem very clear or appropriately revealing. But the emotions of the film have a remarkable and memorable shine.