THE FATHER OF ALL DILEMMAS
AT THE age of 62, and with a fine body of work behind him as an actor, Viggo Mortensen makes a solid directorial debut with Falling ( , 15), in which he also stars as a gay man struggling to deal with his elderly father (Lance Henriksen), who is showing signs of dementia.
In California, John (Mortensen) is happily married to Eric (Terry Chen) and the couple have a daughter. It’s a contented domestic scene into which Willis (Henriksen) arrives, visiting from his farm in upstate New York, like an explosive device. Repeated flashbacks to different phases of John’s childhood show that it isn’t so much dementia making Willis difficult, it’s the fact that he has always been an abusive bigot and bully.
With preternatural patience, John turns a deaf ear to his father’s homophobic tirades and general nastiness, and his sister (Laura Linney), too, seems unduly tolerant of Willis, who made their late mother’s life a misery.
Will the horrible old man show any sign of remorse? You might find that your own patience wears out and stops you caring, such is his relentless, foul-mouthed unpleasantness.
■ AND so to the latest ‘family’ version of A Christmas Carol ( , PG), which features one of fiction’s most celebrated misanthropes, Ebenezer Scrooge. The old misery is voiced by Simon Russell Beale in a visually sumptuous but curiously soporific adaptation, a kind of free-flowing ballet, in which there is no denying the tip-top quality of the cast (Sian Phillips, Martin Freeman, Carey Mulligan, Daniel Kaluuya, Andy Serkis).
And yet, sorry to shout humbug and all that, but I find it hard to picture most families sticking with it even to the middle, let alone the end.
■ Falling and a Christmas Carol are in cinemas from today.