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Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins excel in Florian Zeller's sublime The Father |
Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) is a retired engineer slowly
succumbing to dementia. Events are increasingly confusing to him. Is he living
in his own flat, or is he living with his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman)? Is
Anne moving to France or not? Is she married to Paul (Rufus Sewell) or not? Where
is his other daughter who looks so like a woman who may-or-may-not be his new
carer, Laura (Imogen Poots)? From moment-to-moment Anthony struggles with
confusion, rage and fear as the world constantly fails to coalesce into a
meaningful picture, but instead remains a fragmented jumble.
That’s the brilliance behind Zeller’s adaptation of his own
award-winning play. It captures the perspective of the world for those
suffering from dementia in a way no film has done before. The play’s timeline
is disjointed in an almost Nolan-esque way, and it’s not clear whether we are
watching ‘real’ events’ or if all of these events are memories of Anthony’s
which dementia has shuffled, reordered and recast. Either way, the film
constantly refuses to allow you any grounding from scene-to-scene, and refuses
to present clear answers (although you can infer much).
Even the sets betray us. From to scene to scene the apartment
is redressed, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes in jarringly different ways.
The same fundamental layout sees every room constantly redesigned. Sometimes it
could be Anthony’s apartment. Sometimes Anne’s apartment. Sometimes a mix of
the two. Sometimes it’s a hospital, in others a retirement home. Often it might
be a combination of one or more of these locations all at once. The style of
decoration is inconsistent, the furniture changes, pictures move, even the
colours of bedsheets change. Every single scene disorientates us: it’s only a
movie for us, but for Anthony this is his life.
In fact, if The Father has a filmic influence, interestingly
it’s a horror-film. Anthony is a man trapped in a situation where he knows everything
is wrong, but can never fully understand why, or get people to listen to him. Often
the camera catches discomfort and fear on Hopkins’ face, and it’s clear he
neither knows where he is or, in many cases, who the people with him are. But
for fear of not being believed or a sense of powerlessness, he’s too proud and
scared to ask. It taps into the powerlessness of horror films, where you are
relentlessly chased by a force outside your control: in The Father that
force is life, which has become for Anthony a disturbing kaleidoscope where
everything makes sense to everyone except him.
Of course, a large part of this is sold by Anthony Hopkins
Oscar-winning lead performance. Hopkins delivers to an astonishing degree: this
might just be the greatest performance of his career. Although we see flashes
of ‘the true Anthony’ – his wit, playfulness and intelligence – Hopkins deftly
and subtly demonstrates the wildly varying mood swings dementia brings. At
times he’s paranoid, defensive and even aggressive. At others he’s stunningly
vulnerable and scared – he has two breakdown scenes of such heart-breaking
vulnerability and boyish fear, they are tough to watch.
The film opens with Anne telling Anthony she’ll be leaving
for Paris, and Hopkins’ face collapses into a crumpled, puffy, scared-little-boy
face while he plaintively asks what will happen to him. Anthony fixates on
things that give him any sense of control: he is obsessed with his watch, hiding
it and continuously searching for it. He will dredge up a fact from the distant
past to ‘prove’ he has not lost his memory. He snaps angrily when he feels he
is being talked down to. His resentment expresses itself in viciously cruel
verbal assaults on Anne, labelling her a disappointment, failure and his least
favourite child. Then a few scenes later he’ll squeeze her shoulder and quietly
and lovingly thank her for everything she has done for him. All of this is
delivered by Hopkins with no grand-standing, but with a hugely affecting truthfulness.
It’s an astonishingly good performance.
Every scene carefully demonstrates time and again Anthony’s
fear and vulnerability. Actors are even replaced by other actors in several
scenes. In Anne’s second appearance she is played by Olivia Williams. In a
beautiful piece of subtle acting by both Hopkins and Williams, it’s clear
Anthony doesn’t recognise Anne and she realises this but decides not to say
anything. Anne’s husband (or boyfriend – Anthony remains unclear, so at times
so do we) Paul (as he’s called most of the time) is mostly played by Rufus
Sewell, but sometimes by Mark Gatiss. Paul is the closest the film has to an
antagonist, although much of that is filtered through Anthony’s confused
perception and, in any case, Paul is right that Anthony’s condition is making
it too difficult for him to remain at home.
And we can see his point. Although each scene more-or-less
makes sense within itself, the complete film is like looking at a jigsaw puzzle
with all the pieces upside down and no picture, and then being asked to
assemble it. In one particularly brilliant dinner scene, the film starts with
Anthony witnessing a conversation between Paul and Anne, then loops through the
scene and ends with Anthony witnessing exactly the same conversation again. The
film is a deliberately, brilliantly, opaque tableau that defies easy meaning.
In all, The Father is a quite unique and brilliant
film, that translates a theatrical piece into something highly cinematic.
Hopkins is breath-taking, but Colman is also superb as Anne, in a part
tailor-made for her ready empathy and easy emotionalism. Zeller’s direction is
astonishingly confident and dynamic for a first-timer and the film slots you
into the world of a dementia sufferer with an alarming immediacy. A superb
film.
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