Review: The Father (2021)
Directed by Florian Zeller; screenplay by and based on the play of Florian Zeller; starring Sir Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Coleman, Olivia Williams.
The Father, originally starting life out as a stage play by the name ‘Le Père,’ is a frustratingly close-to-great exploration of the impact of Alzheimer’s on the life of the elderly Anthony (Sir Anthony Hopkins) and his close family. Florian Zeller directs here with a proficiency rarely seen in cinematic debuts, but with the added context of his closeness with the work being adapted (he was the adapted text’s playwright), the marvel of his debut loses some of its magic. Ultimately, The Father is a disorienting and thrillingly repressed horror film right up until its final act, during which Zeller makes the questionable decision to pull the film’s mask off to reveal all of its clever little mechanisms. The effect of which is to reduce the film to an exercise in technique, rather than an expression of life.
The film starts as Anne seems to be visiting Anthony in his own home and we appear to be on the brink of a momentous turning point in the pair’s lives. Anne expresses to her father that he needs a carer now more than ever if he’s to continue living in the apartment but Anthony refuses to admit that he needs help and on the face of things it appears as though Anthony might be right. He’s curmudgeonly and a little forgetful, forgetting where placed his watch and assuming the carer stole it, but he seems okay. As the scene progresses, Anne reveals that she’s met someone and is moving to Paris – this is why she can’t be there for her father and needs to find a carer. Or is it?
From here, the film slowly reveals its hand and to what it’s ultimately driving at. After Anne leaves, a man – calling himself Paul (played by Mark Gatiss) – appears in the flat, telling Anthony this is where he lives and starting one of the many key through-lines of the film, namely whether or not the flat is really Anthony’s. It’s a perplexing encounter and purposefully impenetrable, slowly leaving breadcrumbs to imply that Anthony really isn’t as capable as he first appeared. Information contradicting that gleaned from the scene prior unravels Anthony’s degenerative brain disease to us and when Anne reappears, this time played by Olivia Williams and not Coleman (a device used over and over), the horror of the situation hits home.
Anthony’s is an illness that robs the mind of the faces, the minds and the warmth of his loved ones and Zeller communicates the severity of that experience with a subtlety and empathy that is really enough alone to recommend it. I say empathy, here, because that’s really what it is. Zeller forces the audience into Anthony’s fracturing perspective, refuses to give any real answers and is wholly successful in his approach for it. But then, we reach the final act and that seems to all come crumbling down.
With a tale such as this, it’s crucial that the filmmaker understands the distinct phenomenological differences between the audience and the lived experience they’re seeing unfold and for so long it feels as though Zeller gets this – and this is why it’s so tragic when it becomes apparent that he has some other motive or may simply just not have fully got the point of his own narrative technique.
Ultimately, it is a dream sequence that heralds the beginning of the end. Disastrously giving us the first piece of new information pertaining to the fate of Anthony’s youngest daughter Lucy (Imogen Poots). Up until this point in the film, all the new information Anthony manages to squeeze out of those he talks to is contradicted or itself a contradictory to prior information and so the narrative seems to loop round and round, repeating conversations and moments from many different angles. This new piece to the puzzle is different inasmuch as it never contradicts anything. It’s solid evidence as to what has happened in the past and helps elucidate prior scenes and it’s a foothold for the audience. Consequently, when Anthony later on has his world view shattered once more, we’re no longer aligned with him, because we’ve been able to start to piece things together.
And the rest of this final act continues to wade into these misaligning waters grounding identities, that had been previously entirely up in the air, by offering up more conclusive answers. This means that, when it comes time for Anthony’s final breakdown that ultimately won Sir Anthony the best actor awards in last week’s Academy Awards ceremony, we’re once more on the outside of things and have a few answers we previously never had. Just as we had been at the start, we’re othered from Anthony. It’s hard to entirely say why Zeller felt the need to do this, but there’s something so completely annoying about the film’s need to resolve everything, to tell the audience how clever it is that it did have solutions all along.
As others have discussed, the sensibilities of the stage do translate fine here, but it often seems as though little more has been added to fully justify the adaptation. Everything from the cast to the plot, to the setting has been stripped back to minimalism, which in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. When it comes to how the medium is used to tell the story, though, it appears Zeller has given little thought to how the cinematic could also be used to show Anthony’s illness, sticking faithfully to his own source material, or at least the medium within which it was born.
To briefly mention the performances and give my two cents on Sir Anthony’s victory, I really don’t think it’s very deserved with what’s on display here. Hopkins is fine and even strong at times but the other nominees within the category were so much more compelling in my opinion – even within The Father’s own cast list, Coleman is at times superior in her capacity to show a kind of achingly repressed heartbreak and frustration. So, yeah, it’s a little disappointing, really.
Watched on 28th April.