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Don’t confuse “The Father” for another Hollywood illness movie. It tells the story of a man with dementia, but it’s not melodramatic and doesn’t instill a comfortable sense of pity. It’s sobering. It takes us into the experience of dementia, while providing one of the greatest showcases for one of our greatest actors, Anthony Hopkins.
The film is based on the play by Florian Zeller, which ran on Broadway and in London’s West End. Zeller adapted his play for the screen, in partnership with Christopher Hampton. Zeller directed. I saw the play on Broadway (Frank Langella had the lead role) and can confirm that the film is an entirely successful transplantation of material from one medium to another.
The brilliance of “The Father” lies in the way it simultaneously shows dementia from inside and outside the experience. That simultaneity is key. Zeller never draws an easily discernible line between what Anthony (Hopkins) sees and what’s really there. He never gives us a shot from Anthony’s perspective, followed by a correction. Rather, we see both reality and illusion at the same time and have to sift through our own impressions.
Yet even as we struggle, like Anthony, to know what’s going on, we can track, from the outside, the reactions of his daughter (Olivia Colman) and the people around him. So we’re within and without the nightmare. We feel what it’s like to be him, and what it’s like to be with him.
Anyone who has gone through the experience of dementia in an elderly loved one will recognize much in “The Father.” Anthony may be losing his mind, but he’s not losing his personality or his intelligence. So he can convincingly argue that he should remain in his flat, on his own, well past the point that ★★★★
Review "The Father"
■ Rated: PG-13 for some strong language, and thematic material
■ Running time: 97 min he can take care of himself. And because he is the parent — the authority figure — he can make the daughter almost believe it.
At one point, he meets a young health care worker (Imogen Poots), and because she is young and pretty, he lights up and turns on the charm. But just as quickly, he turns on her. He keeps losing things and imagining that people are stealing from him. He keeps insisting that conversations happened that, in fact, did not happen. Some of this is funny, in a macabre way, though this is far from a comedy.
In “The Father,” we see a man slipping out to sea, but we experience this viscerally, so that sea seems to be slipping into us. His mind is breaking up like an iceberg, and what’s left are chunks of dreamworld and, occasionally, the face of the less-favored daughter. As the daughter, Colman is a portrait of guilt, fear, doubt and exhaustion — combined with the residual eagerness of a child who wasn’t loved enough.
As for Hopkins, it’s a wonderful thing that an actor known for his austerity and control should reach the climax of a storied career in a performance so open. It’s a performance of technical mastery, in the way he captures dementia’s physical cues, the weight shifting, the changes in gait. But it’s the delicacy of the performance that we’ll remember most.
Hopkins makes himself transparent. He lets us see both who this man was and what he is now. There’s dignity in the crumbling facade and childlike terror in the eyes — and a warning to those who’ll be lucky enough to live so long.
There’s also a cosmic rightness in the fact that, at the end of one of the worst years imaginable for the oldest among us, this should be this period’s greatest screen performance — that of an octogenarian actor playing an afflicted old man.