Film review

  • The Father

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Florian Zeller (2020)

    There aren’t too many ways that dementia dramas can end.  As their number increases, so does the pressure on writers and directors to come up with formal novelty.  In last year’s Relic, for example, Natalie Erika James turned the subject into a horror movie (the concept seemed to me a tautology).  Florian Zeller was ahead of the game.  In his internationally acclaimed stage work Le Père, first staged in Paris in 2012, the title character, André, is losing his mind and that’s where, essentially, the action takes place.  A complete stranger turns up in André’s apartment and claims to live there.  More than one actress plays Anne, André’s daughter.  The apartment’s décor is somewhat unstable.  Le Père first became a piece of cinema in the form of Philippe Le Guay’s Floride (2015) but it seems fair to see The Father as the play’s authentic screen adaptation.  Christopher Hampton, who translated Le Père into English for the stage, shares the picture’s writing credit with Zeller, making his debut here as a feature film director.  André is now Anthony, played by Anthony Hopkins

    The dramatic (and moral) virtue of Zeller’s approach is that the audience, for a while at least, shares in the protagonist’s disorientation instead of merely observing it.  Anthony’s sense of being trapped builds gradually and strongly.  I assume the occasional sequences outside his London (Maida Vale) flat – he once or twice looks out of the window and watches life going on outside; Anne (Olivia Colman) does some shopping and takes her father to see a doctor (Ayesha Dharker) – don’t have their equivalent in the stage play.  But these interludes hardly relax the claustrophobic tension, which Yorgos Lamprinos’s editing consistently reinforces.  Well played, paced and designed, The Father is an accomplished piece of cinema.  This is the second high-profile film of 2020, following Nomadland, to use for its score an earlier composition by Ludovico Einaudi.  In this case, the music’s austere melancholy gives Anthony’s life a culturally rarefied quality that reminds you of The Father‘s more than thematic kinship with Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012).  This isn’t a big issue, though:  Zeller uses Einaudi sparingly.  The only real problem – I think not a small one – is that, once you realise how The Father works and is set to continue working, you may find yourself less involved in Anthony’s predicament, more aware that you’re watching an acting masterclass from the Anthony portraying him.

    In 2015 Anthony Hopkins played Sir in a TV adaptation of Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser, directed by Richard Eyre.  Hopkins was excellent, except for being too good in the bits where his character, an elderly ham actor, was performing King Lear.  It was all the more disappointing, then, that Hopkins’s own King Lear, in another TV dramatisation that Eyre directed (in 2018), was shouty and lacked variety.   There are echoes of King Lear in The Father – in Anthony’s fears of going crazy, of a sense of eviction from his own life, of persecution by those close to him.  Thanks to the dual incarnation of Anne, he seems to have three daughters:  he’s repeatedly baffled and distressed by the absence of Anne’s younger sister, his favourite child (who it seems died some years ago).  Anthony Hopkins’s patriarch in The Father, a retired engineer rather than a former king, is all his television Lear wasn’t – emotionally rich and precise as well as powerful.  Hopkins is often funny too.  He conveys a fine sense of what octogenarian Anthony must have been as a younger man, and of how he’s always treated Anne.  For the benefit of his new carer, Laura (Imogen Poots), he breaks into a little tap dance.  Blatantly flirting, he tells her he used to be a professional dancer.  Laura is charmed; Anne, who knows her father better, less so.

    It’s exhilarating that Anthony Hopkins, eighty-two when the film was shot, can deliver this performance.  He doesn’t just still have all his acting marbles; he seems, amazingly, to be at the height of his powers.  His Academy Award for The Father, although considered a surprise, was thoroughly deserved.  (Chadwick Boseman is terrific in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom but there’s no way he’d have been the Oscar front-runner for his work in that film had it not been his last.)  Hopkins gets first-rate support from everyone in the small cast.  Olivia Colman melds compassion, exasperation and hurt so skilfully that Anne, despite her father’s volatile perceptions, is a coherent character.  As her husband, Rufus Sewell expertly deploys his talent for civilised menace.

    Each of the other three key players has at least two roles, and Olivia Williams has three.  Imogen Poots doubles briefly as Anthony’s lost younger daughter.  Mark Gatiss, after materialising in the flat, giving his name as Paul, claiming to live there and to be married to Anne, isn’t seen again until the closing stages, when Williams, having appeared as both Anne and Laura, takes her third role.  As daughter and carer, she has a well-meaning but businesslike streak that distinguishes her from Colman and Poots respectively.  As Paul, Mark Gatiss’s bonhomie is edged with condescension.  In both cases, these qualities make added sense when the actors eventually turn into staff in the nursing home where Anthony ends the film.  Confusing Williams’s nurse with his mother, he weeps like a child in her arms.  I found the closing moments of The Father moving.  I feel bad that I can’t say the same of most of what went before in this admirable, dramatically limited film.

    11 June 2021

  • That Cold Day in the Park

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Altman (1969)

    This early Altman, his second feature, is a gender reversal of The Collector but with another big difference:  the captive guest repeatedly escapes from his much older hostess but comes back for more.  His motivation for doing so isn’t obvious.  This makes his behaviour baffling and, for That Cold Day in the Park, is dramatically debilitating.

    The source material is a novel of the same name, by Richard Miles, set in Paris.  Altman and his scenarist, Gillian Freeman, changed the location to Vancouver, where the film was shot.  According to Richard Combs’s Monthly Film Bulletin (October 1969) review, which formed part of the BFI programme note, the young man in Miles’s novel ‘has a clearly placed and defined existence as a male prostitute, an expensive luxury in a Parisian pleasure garden’.  His counterpart in the film, played by Michael Burns, is part of, or at least connected to, Vancouver’s hippy community but, as Combs says, he doesn’t obviously represent its values.  He doesn’t have much identity at all, not even a name – in the cast list he’s ‘the boy’.  (I’ll use the actor’s forename to refer to his character.)  His captor, however, is a different matter.

    Frances Austen (Sandy Dennis) is a wealthy spinster, who lives alone in a handsome apartment that overlooks a park.  In the opening episode, she hosts a dinner party.  Her guests are all older than she is.  They include relatives; friends of Frances’s mother, who we gather has recently died; and the family doctor (Edward Greenhalgh).  He’s attracted to Frances, though the feeling isn’t mutual.   During the soiree, Frances is increasingly distracted by the blonde-haired young man sitting on a bench in the park, in pouring rain.  When her guests have gone she invites him in.  Although it’s obvious enough that she’s lonely and needy, Frances is strikingly businesslike as she helps Michael remove his wet clothes, runs him a bath and makes him food.  He doesn’t speak, though he seems to understand everything she says.  Frances is neither fazed by this nor curious about it.  Michael sleeps that night in the spare room.   Next morning, after bringing him a breakfast tray, she locks him in while she goes shopping for new clothes for him. He tries them on and they fit fine.  She prepares further meals.  That evening, she tells him how much she’s enjoyed her day, for which she thanks him.  After retiring to his room, Michael climbs out of the window.

    Up to this point, the film – or, at least, the compelling Sandy Dennis – holds your interest.  Once Michael leaves the premises, briefly visits his parents and moves on to where his elder, hippy sister, Nina (Susanne Benton), hangs out with her boyfriend (David Garfield), claustrophobic tension quickly leaks out of the narrative.  Once Michael speaks, he loses his (never considerable) sense of mystery.  He knows that Frances locked his bedroom door yet he returns to her apartment next day, bearing a gift of burnt cookies.  Frances’s daily, Mrs Parnell (Rae Brown), tries to send him on his way but Frances intervenes, sending Mrs Parnell on her way instead.  Later, when Frances has gone out, Nina calls round (Michael must have given her the address, unlikely though that seems).  She insists on coming in and having a bath.  She and Michael fool around with the bath foam and so on.  (For a moment, the film seems to be moving into The Servant territory.)  By the time Frances returns, Michael has again disappeared.

    Frances has spent part of the day at a family planning clinic, where she has a diaphragm fitted.  When she gets home, she goes into Michael’s bedroom and asks him to make love to her.  She’s horrified to discover that the blonde hair she sees peeping out from beneath the sheets is not Michael’s but belongs to dolls that he’s put in the bed.  By this point, I was starting to lose belief in Frances too.  She struck me as more credibly and desperately isolated when all she wanted from Michael was his silent company, to see him wearing the clothes she’d bought him, eating the food she’d cooked him.  Sandy Dennis (who, years later, gave a wonderful performance in Altman’s Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) is such a singular presence that it’s a bit of a letdown when Frances expresses sexual desire for Michael in a melodramatic but unsurprising way.

    The disjunction of smug small talk from Frances’s dinner guests and her preoccupation with what she sees from the apartment window gets the film off to a strong start.  As it goes on, Altman seems increasingly interested not in the principals but in lives at the periphery of the story – other women chatting at the family planning clinic, the lesbian couple and a bartender in the dive where Frances engages a prostitute to bring home to the now imprisoned Michael.  I couldn’t see why Frances decided to do this – except to engineer a big finish to the movie.  Once the prostitute, Sylvia (Luana Anders), is in bed with Michael, Frances watches through the keyhole and can’t bear it.  She enters the room and climbs on the bed.  Michael and Sylvia seem to think she’s joining them for a threesome until Frances stabs Sylvia to death.  She then tells Michael it’s all OK, there’s no need to be afraid, etc, and the film ends.  ‘Fuuur-ckin’ hell …’ a BFI usher observed derisively to his colleague as they prepared to open the exit doors for the audience.  That struck me as a pretty fair response to the finale.

    Michael Burns, an experienced teenage actor on American television, would appear in more TV shows after That Cold Day in the Park.  Even allowing that his role is badly underwritten, Burns is unimpressive:  it was good to see from Wikipedia that he abandoned acting for a successful academic career later in the 1970s (he’s now professor emeritus of history at Mount Holyoke College).  The acting in most of the smaller roles is even less distinguished, save for Michael Murphy.  As a shady individual Frances meets on her mission to find her prisoner a woman, Murphy is in a different class from the rest of the cast.  With the exception, that is, of Sandy Dennis.  Her range may have been limited but she was hard to beat as a febrile neurotic.  We never know how old Frances Austen is.  As Dan O’Callahan wrote in the Sight & Sound (April 2013) note that made up the other half of the BFI handout, thirty-one-year-old Dennis makes Frances’s face ‘both girlish and ancient, like a schoolgirl decaying into an elderly lady before our eyes’.

    8 June 2021

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