Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Drama showcases Anthony Hopkins at devastating best
In “The Father’s” house are many rooms, all of them appointed with details so sharp and precise that you might be startled to find them vanishing a few moments later: Didn’t those backsplash tiles look different a minute ago? Wasn’t there a lamp on that side table? The French writer-director Florian Zeller, adapting his internationally acclaimed play for the screen, has a meticulous eye and a keen sense of mischief, which doesn’t lighten so much as heighten the implacable tragedy at the heart of this story. The pleasures of trying to decipher the plot give way to crushing futility; you’re left sifting through the pieces of a puzzle that’s almost too painful to solve.
Those pieces have been plucked from the life of an 80-year-old Englishman named Anthony. Known as Andre in the play, he has been renamed here in honor of his interpreter, Anthony Hopkins, who repays it with a performance of extraordinary psychological cunning and emotional force. We first encounter Anthony listening to a recording of Henry Purcell and John Dryden’s 1691 dramatic opera “King Arthur, or the British Worthy.” Before long his daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman), comes in and the music stops, though not before an aria have rung out: “What power art thou, who from below/ Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow/ From beds of everlasting snow?”
Soon enough, a deep, menacing chill descends on this movie like a fog and stays there, wrapping around the mind of a man trying to shake off his slumber. Less an unreliable narrator than an unreliable observer, Anthony is in a rapidly advancing state of dementia. His fierce tantrums have recently burned through a series of in-home nurses, leaving Anne at her wits’ end.
Anthony, for his part, has a rather different understanding of who’s intruding on whom. His daughter sometimes becomes a stranger. He is visited and attended to by others he doesn’t recognize. He reacts to each new piece of information with skepticism and fascination as if he were an investigator making a surprising discovery.
“The Father,” in other words, is both a detective story and a study in confinement. The original play availed itself of the natural abstractions of theatrical space, turning the stage into a psychological hall of mirrors. But Zeller, making an elegant and incisive feature debut, finds an ideal equivalent within the more realistic parameters of the movie screen.
The rigorous interiority of “The Father” compels your attention: If narrative cinema is largely predicated on the illusion of seamlessness, there’s something apt about the way Zeller both upholds and shatters that illusion, bridging the narrative gap across a series of jarring discontinuities. You can imagine the mind doing something similar, struggling for lucidity in the wake of mounting incoherence.
But you don’t need to imagine it because for the entirety of the movie, Hopkins embodies it. His Anthony can be vulnerable and fierce, broken and defiant: His moments of verbal acuity and selfaware humor exist on a continuum with his equally sudden lapses into oblivion.
The film’s final embrace is a quietly astounding vision of grace in solitude, and it harks back to that opening aria, with its invocation of eternal winter and the unheard rejoinder that follows: “’Tis Love, ’tis Love, ’tis Love that has warm’d us.”
MPAA rating: PG-13 (strong language and thematic material)
Running time: 1:37
Where to watch: In theaters and streaming on demand Feb. 26