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