A man refuses all assistance from his daughter as he ages. As he tries to make sense of his changing circumstances, he begins to doubt his loved ones, his own mind, and even the fabric of his reality.
Writer-director Florian Zeller is a renowned French playwright who has many stageplay credits to his name, including one called “The Father.” As a first-time filmmaker, he has adapted his own prize-winning French play of the same name and brought it to the big screen where two powerhouse Academy Award-winning actors take center stage: Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman. Very seldom do first-time filmmakers bring such emotional depth and intensity to their inaugural big-screen outing but Zeller packs so much sentimental fervor and passion into 97 minutes, by the time the final credits begin to roll, you don’t want the film to end, you want to continue watching Hopkins and Colman, both in career-defining performances and at the top of their respective games, and hope that they will live happily ever after. Unfortunately, when your subject matter involves an aging parent slowly succumbing to Dementia, the final outcome will be anything but.
Anthony (Hopkins) is an 80-year-old man who lives with his middle-aged daughter Anne (Colman) in her spacious flat in London. As the story progresses, we see that Anthony is gradually falling victim to memory loss but what director Florian Zeller does, in an unexpected turn of events, is allow us to see everything that unfolds from Anthony’s perspective, a bold but ingenious move. When we first meet Anne, she is played by Olivia Colman but in a later scene, she is played by Olivia Williams. The flat itself is decorated with beautiful frames of artwork but steadily, we notice the frames missing or hanging in other parts of the flat. When we first meet Anne, she tries to tell her father that she is moving to Paris to be with her new boyfriend and that they need to come to some sort of arrangement where Anthony will have to move into a Dementia community as he is unable to take care of himself.
Naturally, he refuses, stating that the flat is actually his and that she is living with him. Later on though, when he asks her about Paris again, she knows nothing of it, stating that she has no boyfriend and will not be moving away from London. She manages to get Anthony to agree to allow a young caregiver named Laura (Imogen Poots) to assist with his daily routines while she is out at work but she reminds him too much of his younger daughter Lucy, who sadly passed away years earlier in a tragic accident. As a way to deal with it, Anthony has blocked it from his mind and is now convinced that Lucy is traveling the globe. Increasingly, Anthony’s world becomes more fractured and ambiguous as he finds himself living through the exact same conversation on more than one occasion and sporadically, he discerns that Anne is actually married and has a husband, Paul, who is played by Rufus Sewell in some scenes and Mark Gatiss in others. This misdirect is deliberate and validated in the film’s finale. Watching “The Father” under any other circumstance would be frustrating beyond belief but knowing that Anthony is afflicted with Dementia, means that we are viewing this story from his point of view, and sharing in all of his emotions.
Both Hopkins and Colman are absolutely mesmerizing in this heartbreaking masterpiece. Hopkins demands the screen every time he appears and the gradual decline of his physical appearance as well as his mental dexterity takes a toll not only on his character but on the viewer too. We can feel what he’s going through, the constant fogginess, the memory lapses, the anger and frustration of knowing something is wrong but not being able to identify it, it’s all there for the taking, and the more we take, the more grief-stricken we become, along with Anthony. Olivia Colman’s Anne has no choice but to simply observe her father’s mental and physical deterioration and his occasional inability to recognize her. She puts on a brave face but we occasionally get a quiet glimpse of her, heartbroken and fragile as she struggles to keep up appearances in front of her father.
“The Father” is a powerful and compelling drama that doesn’t hold back on showing the effects Dementia has on people, not just those afflicted with the ailment but also the family members and caregivers who look after them. In the film’s final scene, we realize that most of what we have witnessed up to this point was all in Anthony’s head, as he comprehends, in a rare moment of clarity, that his daughter Anne did indeed move to Paris and left him in a nursing facility. He regresses to his childhood and starts crying out for his mother to come and save him and Catherine, his caregiver, takes him into her arms and nurtures him, much like his mother would have. This has to be one of the most heart-rending and tragic scenes I have seen in a movie and it brought this reviewer to tears. Shortly after being nurtured by Catherine, Anthony’s moment of clarity fades, and he has already forgotten what just transpired and is excited to go outside with her for a walk on the facility’s beautiful lush grounds. This is not an easy watch but I promise you, it will be worth every second.
Now playing in Select Theaters and on Premium VOD March 26th
