May
05
Tags
The Father (2020)
It’s hard to imagine any audience describing The Father (2020) as entertaining. Gripping and emotionally harrowing are more accurate words to describe this towering Oscar-winning performance by Anthony Hopkins. Over and above its cinematic achievements, this film puts you directly into the mind of someone whose awareness of self and others is fading into darkness.
While the film’s narrative arc is simple, the storyline is complex and convoluted. Once a successful engineer, cantankerous 80-year old Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) is losing his memory and increasingly unable to relate to those around him. His loving daughter Anne (Olivia Coleman) struggles to find a day carer who can tolerate his insults and sacrifices much to keep him at home rather than in institutional care. The entire film is framed around this father and daughter emotional dynamic. What actually happens in traditional storytelling terms is not as important as how the viewer is made to vicariously experience Anthony’s progression towards dementia.
It’s a brave directorial choice to deliberately disorientate viewers. While this is standard fare in many psychological horrors, here it serves the bigger purpose of showing what it feels like to be imprisoned in a deteriorating mind. Non-linear and causally disconnected scenes, inexplicable changes in room décor, and switching actors in key roles, are just some of the devices used to show how the world appears from Anthony’s point of view. This leaves viewers unsure of what is real and what is imagined, while his moods traverse vulnerable, jovial and kind, to belligerent, angry and threatening. In all of them we see a seasoned masterclass in character acting that only a performer of Anthony Hopkin’s stature can bring. Olivia Coleman is an inspired choice as a daughter desperately clinging to a beloved father while his persona unravels before her eyes.
It is one thing to create an emotionally gripping film. It is entirely another to bring a global mental health issue out from the shadows and into the midst of conversations about dementia and aged care. Such conversations need louder voices for change. This film offers an interior portrait of the many ways that dementia can break a sufferer’s grip on reality and this can only help us understand the condition. Without any relief, the story must conclude with sadness. The Father is a film that is both painful to watch and an ultimately rewarding experience.
Director: Florian Zeller
Stars: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Coleman
CineMuseFilms 
Thanks for this (another) well written review…I read a report about the film at the time when the Oscars were handed out and wondered if you would be reviewing it. The producers were brave to make it. I’m sure they had a job finding backers for it. I don’t know if it is making a profit, even with the stirling performance of Hopkins (and I don’t need to see it to imagine just how realistically he has characterise the part). It is also difficult to try to introduce any humour or other light-hearted material into such a story, so I also imagine that it is a depressing film, particularly for those close to anyone with that condition. (I’ve known, or have known of, several people who have had this awful disease but the one I most recall was when I was still in my teens and my brother and I belonged to a concert party during the war. The fellow who ran the outfit and the most genial and entertaining M/C for the show, contracted the condition. I had no experience of it then, But when I went to see him in hospital, I was utterly shocked by the way he didn’t know me or my brother and began at once to abuse and curse us in the most erratic and offensive manner. He seemed possessed of malignant demon (something I learned about later that the Jewish faith call dybbuks).
OT
PS. The best role I’ve seen Hopkins portray, is the abased servant in The Remains of The Day. Brilliant!
Sent from Mail for Windows 10
LikeLiked by 1 person
Despite the accolades, I cannot see it doing great in Box Office. Younger viewers will be scared off and older viewers are tired of tears in this crazy world. The other great Hopkins role was as Hannibel Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. He could teach Hitchcock about horror. Thanks for commenting John.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks for the review Richard. This is one of the few films I braved the cinemas for post covid, it was well worth it (still carry the ticket stump with me today).
It’s a brilliant, poignant film in 3 ways: 1) riveting performance from Hopkins, 2) gripping storyline that unwinds like peeling of an onion, 3) puts me in the perspective of my grandparents who suffer/suffered from the disease. The film’s last scene also brought uncontrollable tears. Such is the fragility of life.
Hope all is well with you, take care.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That last scene still haunts me: “The film’s last scene also brought uncontrollable tears. Such is the fragility of life”. Nice to hear from you Jolene.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Superb review! This film made me think about another one that I felt shed a beautifully sad POV on the progression of dementia, Still Alice. They are very different films but focus on the same topic; a topic that weighs on the minds of so many of us, either as we approach that fateful day in our own personal lives, or as we worry about parents/grandparents who are headed for that abyss.
It was a heartbreaking and confusing film to watch. As is the disease.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thank you Linda. I do remember Still Alice as another strong film in this rare genre. It may be that the depressing news out of aged care homes around the world has intensified the horrors of The Father. People actually need to see such films to even remotely begin to understand the steps into dementia.
LikeLiked by 1 person