The Father (2021)
*contains spoilers*
Based on the world-renowned and re-enacted stage play of the same name by French writer and first-time director Florian Zeller, ‘The Father’ is a very personal portrayal of a very universal experience. Not only is it a masterclass in acting by legendary Welshman Sir Anthony Hopkins, even more importantly than that, it’s an intimate and powerful portrait of a man’s life in the throes of dementia.
These days there is an emphasis on embracing ageing and the wisdom, life experiences and insights that come from a long life. For a lot of people, however, ageing gracefully isn’t an option, and instead of shuffling off this mortal coil with memories of a life well lived and their dignity and humanity intact, they have to struggle and fight their way out.
Most of us of know something about or someone with dementia or Alzheimer's and can quite easily substitute Hopkins’ character for one of our own loved ones, but the poignancy in the performance doesn’t rely on prior knowledge. We know how hard it is for the families but we don’t think about it enough from the sufferer’s point of view. ‘The Father’ puts Anthony’s upsetting, chaotic and confusing frame of mind front and centre.
Hopkins is a powerhouse, that we know, but when you think that he won his first Oscar playing the terrifyingly magnetic and metallic tongued cannibal Hannibal Lecter in ‘Silence of The Lambs’, and has now just won his second Oscar as the frighteningly forgetful and fragile Anthony in ‘The Father’, his talent and range really does astound. At the age of 83, he is still in his prime and taking on another great role, and arguably his greatest role to date.
Banal moments of everyday life are peppered with sudden shocks and utter bewilderment as Anthony battles to make sense of his confronting new world. His existence may seem small and within the confides of one room or one flat, but his struggle is of earth-shattering proportions. Although dialogue, inner monologues and interactions are often the key cinematic tools used to convey a character’s thoughts and feelings, someone with memory loss doesn’t have the neurological energy or cohesion to explain the confusion inside their heads, so as Anthony’s descent into full blown dementia escalates, the audience is taken with him. Feelings of distress, disorientation, frustration, anger, loneliness, exhaustion, and heart-break increasingly consume Anthony’s every waking hour, and as a viewer, you very quickly begin to share the same sentiments and concerns.
Stylistically, script and production design wise, the film’s psychological roller coaster ride is strongly supported by a physical assault on the senses too. Scenes are repeated with slight variations in dialogue and staging, day becomes night and then suddenly back to day again, rooms are rearranged in the blink of an eye and a revolving door of actors come and go as the same characters. It’s amazing just how claustrophobic it can get inside your own head!
You begin to wonder how many days, weeks, or months the story is being played out over, and was he in the nursing home the whole time or did we chronologically journey from his flat, to Anne’s and then the home? Did the trauma of losing his beloved youngest daughter Lucy to an accident bring on his dementia or was it predisposed? Like the disease that is rapidly ravaging his mind, the movie and the character of Anthony is complex, with emotions that run the gamut from gentle, charming and cooperative to irate, stubborn and paranoid. He was, until very recently, a man of great intelligence and independence, so losing control and purpose understandably rocks him to the core.
His daughter Anne (the always brilliant Olivia Colman and momentarily also played by Olivia Williams) has great love, empathy and patience, but like most carers, there is only so much of her father’s everchanging moods and manners that she can endure. Her husband Paul (a deliberately disjointed joint acting effort by Mark Gatiss and Rufus Sewell) barely hides his insensitivity and implies that Anthony is intentionally burdening them by exaggerating his symptoms. He mainly treats his father-in-law’s condition with contempt and cruelty, and unless it was another lapse in reality, even physically attacks him in one of many harrowing scenes.
And like the supporting cast, ‘The Father’ often has you too paralysed by indecision. No, Anne shouldn’t have to give up her whole life to care for her ill father, however when she eventually does, you resent her for leaving him when he needs her the most. In the traumatic finale, when in a brief moment of clarity, he realises the extent of his condition and circumstance, Anthony cries “I feel as if I’m losing all my leaves”. It’s such a potent and poetic line. He feels vulnerable, exposed, upset, lonely, lost and afraid. It’s impossible to sum up how agonising and isolating it must feel to know you are slowly slipping away, but this goes some way to explain it in the simplest and saddest of terms. And if Hopkins sobbing for his “mummy” doesn’t reduce you to tears then I don’t know what will.
There are brief moments of levity, from Anthony’s obsession with his watch (or lack of it) and Parisian’s not speaking English, to his energetic interactions with his young new carer Laura (Imogen Poots), but I’m not going to lie. When I say the smiles and laughs are brief, I mean just that. Ultimately, ‘The Father’ isn’t a movie that can accommodate a happy ending and it would do a huge disservice to the ethos of the story if it did. The reality of dementia is that it doesn’t get worse before it gets better, it just gets worse. Sufferers slowly and painfully fade away into oblivion and their loved ones have to watch from the sidelines, helpless to do anything about it.
I’ve never cried as many times as I did during and after this screening, but please don’t let that put you off. Although on an emotional level it’s not for the faint of heart, anybody with a heart will feel privileged to have witnessed one of the best performances of Anthony Hopkins’ stellar career and one of the most damaging and demoralising real-life issues affecting our ageing population today.
Whether by design or devastating irony, ‘The Father’ is a movie about forgetting, but for me (and no doubt so many others), it’s a movie I will never forget.
5/5 stars
‘The Father’ is in cinemas now!
