The Father – Anthony Hopkins superb in unbearably heartbreaking film
Hopkins gives a moving, Oscar-winning turn as a man with dementia in a film full of intelligent performances, disorienting time slips and powerful theatrical effects
“Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!” says King Lear, a plea which is overwhelmingly sad because it can never be heard by anyone with the power to grant it. Anthony Hopkins, who played Lear in Richard Eyre’s production for the BBC, now delivers another performance as an ailing patriarch with a favourite daughter and nowhere to stay, in a film directed by Florian Zeller, and adapted by Christopher Hampton from Zeller’s own award-winning stage play. There is unbearable heartbreak in this movie, for which Hopkins has become history’s oldest best actor Oscar-winner, and also genuine fear, like something you might experience watching Roman Polanski’s Repulsion or M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth
Hopkins is Anthony, a roguishly handsome and cantankerous old widower, a retired engineer who lives on his own in a spacious, well-appointed apartment in west London, receiving regular visits from his affectionate and exasperated daughter Anne, who is played at the highest pitch of intelligence and insight by Olivia Colman.
But things are very wrong, because Anthony has dementia. He is subject to mood-swings and fits of temper connected with his sudden terror at not being able to work out what is going on. His behaviour has already caused his existing carer to quit, and now Anne tells him that he simply has to get on with the new one, Laura (Imogen Poots). This is because Anne, after the end of her marriage to Paul (Rufus Sewell) – to whom we will be introduced later – has now at last found a new partner and the opportunity for happiness that she deserves. She is going abroad with him, and can’t look after Anthony any more.
Sense.
What is deeply scary about The Father is that, without obvious first-person camera tricks, it puts us inside Anthony’s head. We see and don’t see what he sees and doesn’t see. We are cleverly invited to assume that certain passages of dialogue are happening in reality – and then shown that they aren’t. We experience with Anthony, step by step, what appears to be the incremental deterioration in his condition, the disorientating time slips and time loops. People morph into other people; situations get elided; the apartment’s furniture seems suddenly and bewilderingly to change; a scene which had appeared to follow the previous one sequentially turns out to have preceded it, or to be Anthony’s delusion or his memory of something else. And new people, people he doesn’t recognise (played by Mark Gatiss and Olivia Williams) keep appearing in his apartment and responding to him with that same sweet smile of patience when he asks what they are doing there. The universe is gaslighting Anthony with these people.
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Anthony is of course different from Lear in one particular: he doesn’t know what is happening to him, or has happened. Things are too far gone. But Hopkins shows how an awareness of his previous existence is still there at a deeper, almost physical level, sometimes resurfacing in his devastatingly contrite little apologies to Anne. And one scene with Paul in which Anthony becomes whimperingly afraid shows us that there are things that Anne doesn’t know about Anthony’s life.
Hopkins’s final speech to Williams is the one that reduced me to a blubbering mess. But the most subtly poignant moments are those in which Anthony will laugh – a flash of his old, roguishly charming self – and Anne and his carer will supportively laugh along with him. To some degree, it is a nervous laugh because Anne knows just how easily his mood can turn, and it is also a professional carer’s laugh, and a strained tragicomic laugh, the laugh you do instead of crying. But it’s also a perfectly genuine kind of laugh and, in its way, an urgent, shared gesture of faith in the person that Anthony was and occasionally still is.
The Father has something of Michael Haneke’s Amour in its one-apartment setting, and also something of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1985 stage-play Woman in Mind, in which the heroine retreats from reality. Its effects are essentially theatrical – but they are powerfully achieved, and the performances from Hopkins and Colman are superb. It is a film about grief and what it means to grieve for someone who is still alive.
A watch. A painting. A chicken dinner. A snippet of conversation.
These and other everyday pieces of a life take on greater significance and heartbreaking meaning throughout the course of “The Father.” They’re at once mundane and unreliable, tactile and elusive within the ever-shifting mind of Anthony Hopkins’ character, an 80-year-old Londoner succumbing to dementia.
Writer/director Florian Zeller, adapting his prize-winning, 2012 French play of the same name with the help of the legendary Christopher Hampton (“Dangerous Liaisons,” “Atonement”), has pulled off a dazzling feat here. He puts us within the mind of the ailing Hopkins’ Anthony, allowing us to experience his confusion as if it were our own. But he also offers the perspective of the caretakers and loved ones who try to settle his volatile temper and organize his jumbled memories. We never know what’s true—or who, for that matter, as characters come and go and take on various names and identities, depending on his recognition of them. Everything is fleeting and yet each specific moment feels urgent and real.
Struggling to navigate this muddied mélange of past and present is a brilliant Hopkins, giving a performance that’s both charismatic and ferocious, sometimes within the same breath. There’s mind-blowing specificity to his technique here as he’s called upon to convey a wide range of feelings and emotions, but also a softness and openness we’ve rarely seen from him. It’s some of the absolute best work of Hopkins’ lengthy and storied career.
And as his daughter, Anne, Olivia Colman is consistently his equal. She, too, must ride this roller coaster and struggle to put on a British, stiff upper lip within a situation that’s steadily crumbling. She’ll manage a smile as tears well in her eyes or flinch ever so slightly yet maintain her patience when her father says something rude and insulting. As our guide—as much as Zeller will allow us one—Colman is tremendous as always.
But mainly we see the world through Anthony’s eyes, and at first, that seems like a pretty peaceful place to be. When we spy him initially, he’s listening to opera on a pleasant afternoon in his spacious, tastefully appointed London flat. But soon, Anne stops by to visit and informs him she’s met someone and is moving to Paris to be with him. His demeanor changes instantly and, feeling wounded, he lashes out: “You?” he asks incredulously. “You mean, a man?” Later, as the long-term reality of this news hits him, he reveals a deeper layer of hurt: “So if I understand correctly, you’re leaving me, is that it? You’re abandoning me.” His face falls a bit but he still tries to exert a measure of control and bravado.
Some version of this sort of conversation happens again and again—over where he placed his beloved watch, for example, or the cruel treatment he inflicted upon his previous at-home caregiver. And just when we think we’re getting into the rhythm of “The Father,” it changes the tempo and the players. Maybe this isn’t Anthony’s flat—maybe it’s Anne’s and she’s taken him in to stay with her. Maybe she has a husband after all, named Paul (Rufus Sewell), with whom she still lives. And maybe now she’s being played by Olivia Williams in a clever bit of casting, given their similar features. The arrival of Imogen Poots as a potential candidate to look after Anthony provides some sunshine, as it gives him the opportunity to flirt with a pretty young woman. He’s randy and charming as he declares playfully, “Time for an aperitif!” But she also reminds him of his other daughter, who was an artist, and whatever happened to that painting of hers that was hanging above the mantle … ? Anthony’s first meeting with Poots’ Laura is a great example of what a shock it can be when Zeller pulls the rug out from underneath us—never in gimmicky fashion, but rather as a reflection of the jarring changes occurring within the character’s mind and mood. We feel them, too.
But while some moments of memory loss cause a jolt in the story and give Hopkins room to express his character’s frustration grandly, what’s happening throughout with the production design and editing is so subtle, it’ll make you want to rewind a few seconds just to appreciate the slight changes. Whether it’s different tiles on the kitchen backsplash, a rearranged bedroom or a white grocery bag instead of a blue one holding the chicken to roast that night, production designer Peter Francis vividly creates various versions of this same, enclosed setting. And what editor Yorgos Lamprinos does here is so complicated and yet so understated, it’s like a magic trick right before our eyes. Lamprinos, our Los Angeles Film Critics Association winner for best editing, had the daunting task of crafting a story that’s simultaneously confusing and compelling, and he rose elegantly to that challenge. And the score from Ludovico Einaudi, whose music also appeared recently in Chloé Zhao’s gorgeous “Nomadland,” mirrors the performances in the way it tugs at our hearts without being mawkish.
The fluid nature of the narrative calls to mind Charlie Kaufman’s achingly melancholy drama “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” from last fall. While Kaufman’s story was deeply steeped in his trademark surrealism, what’s so sad about both films is the way they portray the notions of home and family—which should be safe harbors—as ephemeral. The people and imagery we rely on to define us may look familiar, but there’s something slightly off, and that’s deeply unsettling. I suspect it will be especially so for viewers who’ve experienced such a decline with members of their own family. But perhaps it will provide some solace, as well.
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