The Son
Florian Zeller (2022)
Florian Zeller’s The Father (2020) was a technically ingenious dementia drama, elevated by Anthony Hopkins’s superb acting in the title role. Like its forerunner, The Son is adapted by Zeller and Christopher Hampton from the former’s stage play but that’s about the extent of their kinship. This new film, a teenage-depression number showing at the London Film Festival, is thoroughly conventional. It has lead performances to match from Hugh Jackman and Zen McGrath.
Both actors may be playing the title role. A couple of years after the break-up of their marriage, Kate (Laura Dern) turns up one evening on the doorstep of ex-husband Peter (Jackman), who has now set up house with Beth (Vanessa Kirby). Kate has shocking news: she’s just learned that her and Peter’s seventeen-year-old son Nicholas (McGrath), who lives with her, hasn’t attended school in almost a month. Something is wrong: when Peter tries to find out what, Nicholas tells him he’s unhappy with his mother and wants to move in with his father instead. Even though Peter and Beth now have a baby boy of their own, Nicholas joins the household. His emotional frailty is particularly distressing to Peter, who has always been determined to be the caring, attentive father that he himself never had.
The story’s point of departure is given next to no context. We don’t know if Nicholas had any history of depression before Peter and Kate broke up. The break-up may have been triggered by Peter’s liaison with Beth but we don’t know either if that was a one-off or if the marriage had already collapsed for other reasons. These omissions matter – in terms of trying to understand more of the history of Nicholas’s mental health and because of Peter’s preoccupation with being a good father: how did he feel at the time about walking out on Nicholas and how that might affect the boy? (It emerges that the bad blood between Peter and his own father, Anthony, dates back to when Peter’s mother was terminally ill and Anthony ignored both her and his teenage son.) It’s not clear either why Nicholas can’t stand being with Kate beyond the evidence that she’s wearyingly over-solicitous.
Once Nicholas has moved in with Peter and his new family, the plotting makes less and less sense. Peter arranges for Nicholas to see a therapist, who’s on screen for a matter of seconds. Despite many heart-to-hearts between father and son, the therapy isn’t mentioned again, even when Peter discovers that Nicholas is self-harming. We see him on his first day at his new school, taking his place in class. It transpires that, after one day there, Nicholas fakes an email, apparently from his father, informing the new school that it’s been decided he’ll return to his former school. This bombshell arrives weeks or months later. Given what happened before, would conscientious Peter really not check with the new school how things were going?
Zeller’s point surely can’t be that Peter is too obsessed with his work as a partner in a New York law firm to notice what’s happening to his son. Whenever Peter’s in the office, we see him deep in thought about Nicholas, disengaged from the discussions he’s meant to be having with colleagues or clients. Invited to join the political campaign team of a US senator, he sits in meetings looking just the same. (This plot strand seems to be in the film only so that Peter can in due course decide to withdraw from the campaign because Nicholas’s needs are more important.) The Son is one visual cliché after another, especially whenever there’s a door in shot. Kate’s fingers tap nervously on the side of her open front door as she says goodbye to Nicholas at the start (I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone really do that). Later, when her son tries to kill himself, she bursts through hospital swing doors in the direction of the camera. As Peter waits for a lift to get moving, its doors close on his anguished face.
It’s in the aftermath to the suicide attempt that The Son goes into ludicrous overdrive. Nicholas, after being admitted to a psychiatric hospital, is desperate to return home. His doctor (Hugh Quarshie) is most reluctant to agree to this. Rather than talk to Peter and Kate privately, the doctor makes his case in the patient’s presence – so that Nicholas can go wild with anguish (or as wild as Zen McGrath can go) when his parents regretfully accept the doctor’s argument. Feeling they’re traitors to their son, Peter and Kate trudge in sad defeat along a hospital corridor … but wait! It turns out they’re heading for the doctor’s office to sign Nicholas’s discharge papers after all. When the trio first get back to Peter’s place (Beth has sensibly gone with the baby to stay at her mother’s), the action is, for a few moments, credible. As Nicholas’s parents nervously watch his every move, you get a sense of the daunting, endless stress of living with a potential suicide. It’s all the more incredible, then, that when Nicholas says he’s going to take a shower, Kate and Peter don’t betray a hint of anxiety.
Earlier in the film, Nicholas discovers a gun in his father’s home. Peter explains it was given to him in his youth by his father but insists that he himself is strongly opposed to gun ownership. When it first comes up in conversation, the weapon seems to have a purely illustrative and symbolic purpose – illustrating the gulf between Peter and Anthony, symbolising what a child gets from a parent that can’t be got rid of. It doesn’t work effectively as a symbol because Florian Zeller fails to supply a compelling practical reason why Peter can’t discard the gun. Eventually, of course, it comes in handy for Nicholas to put to very real use. Just before he leaves the room, Kate suggests to Nicholas a trip to the cinema. When the gunshot from the bathroom sounds, it interrupts her and Peter’s happy reminiscing about going to the movies when they were first a couple. They clearly had the sense to steer clear of films like The Son; otherwise they’d recognise their son’s last words before he exits – I love you, please forgive me, and so on – as an oral suicide note. Instead, Peter and Kate stupidly (unbelievably) infer from what Nicholas says that he’s well on the road to recovery. Kate and Peter’s chat as he prepares to kill himself also features what is, one assumes unintentionally, the script’s most bizarre line. When Kate asks if he’ll join her and Nicholas at the movie, Peter’s reply is ‘What were you thinking of seeing?’ – as if the cinema outing was a matter of personal taste rather than a way to make his vulnerable son feel more secure.
Nicholas’s death is nowhere near the end of The Son. The action moves on a few years: Peter and Beth’s child, Theo, is now maybe three or four; his parents are still together and preparing to welcome dinner guests. As Beth puts Theo to bed, the doorbell rings. Peter opens the door to a smiling Nicholas, who explains that his girlfriend will be arriving shortly. Nicholas is now living in Toronto and has just had his first novel published. He hands a copy to his father, to whom the book – entitled ‘Death Can Wait’ – is dedicated. Nicholas expresses his deep thanks to Peter for seeing him through that tough time in his life. It’s immediately obvious that Nicholas’s reappearance is his father’s fantasy (Nicholas hasn’t aged a day). It’s a long wait before Beth comes in to recall Peter to sad reality.
Not for the first time, I felt bad watching Hugh Jackman. He tries so hard but he’s passionately uninventive. He has a lot of lines and facial reactions in The Son: hardly any of either takes you by surprise. His best bit comes when Peter briefly stops talking or thinking and shows what a laughable dancer he is, moving around to Tom Jones’s ‘It’s Not Unusual’. Jackman, who really can dance, uses his long limbs and physical energy to make the routine genuinely funny. In gruesome contrast is the scene in which Peter visits Anthony (Anthony Hopkins), the father from whom he’s virtually estranged, at the latter’s grand home in Washington. With no more than five minutes on screen, Anthony Hopkins is still the star of the show. His namesake character is aggressively affable in welcoming Peter but Anthony’s snarl doesn’t hover behind a smile for long. He knows Peter, who thinks he was a terrible husband and father, prides himself on having done better so it’s surprising that, in putting him in his place, Anthony doesn’t have more fun with Peter’s failure in walking out on Kate and Nicholas. Even so, you almost want to cheer when the nasty father tells his suffering son to ‘fucking get over it’. Anthony Hopkins runs rings round Hugh Jackman, who strains to convey his character’s righteous sensitivity. (The exchange rather brings to mind the early encounter between hero and villain in the original Cape Fear (1962). This leaves you appalled not that Robert Mitchum is so evil but that Gregory Peck is so pompously censorious.)
Zen McGrath also tries hard but simply isn’t up to the task: you can almost see him forcing himself to cry each time Nicholas breaks down. McGrath’s eyes are more interesting when they go dead than when they fill with tears. (The combination of this deadness and McGrath’s soft, innocent features reminds you how much more imaginatively Lynne Ramsay might have cast the title character in We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011).) There are a couple of flashback sequences to a sunlit, happy day when Peter taught Nicholas, aged six or seven, to swim in the sea, when the boy had complete trust in his father … These bits verge on embarrassing but George Cobell, as the younger Nicholas, is much more naturally expressive than Zen McGrath. Laura Dern and Vanessa Kirby do better than the main men, despite their poor roles. Kirby has little to do but look uneasy, except when Peter does his dance. Dern, who seems thoroughly middle-aged as never before, certainly gives her all to the lines. You can understand why, after The Father, actors might assume that dialogue from Florian Zeller and Christopher Hampton is bound to be pure gold. Not this time: Laura Dern’s efforts only serve to highlight the staleness of what she’s been given to say.
11 October 2022