Review: The Father

Olivia Colman comes to visit her elderly father (Sir Anthony Hopkins), a dementia sufferer who has a habit of going through caregivers rather rapidly due to his volatile and stubborn nature. While Hopkins rants about a thieving former caregiver, Colman tries to tell her father that she is moving to Paris to be with a man, and that she has organised a new carer to take care of him (Imogen Poots). However, just as you’ve processed all of this new information, there is confusion – because we’re seeing things from the point of view of a dementia sufferer.

 

Sir Anthony Hopkins won the Best Actor Oscar here in this 2021 big-screen adaptation of a 2012 play. It has been written and directed by Florian Zeller, who wrote the play and it looks every bit the play up there on the screen. That’s always an issue for me, it may be less of one for you or none at all. Otherwise this is a solid, occasionally inventive film about a very serious and extremely sad subject. It’s not nearly as good as you would like it to be, but it does have enough plusses to earn a positive rating.

 

Zeller uses quite a clever storytelling tactic here by keeping the audience as much in the dark as the Anthony Hopkins character, who is suffering from dementia. In the film, for the most part our POV is Hopkins’, so we only understand things through his obviously impaired comprehension. Co-scripted by Christopher Hampton (the totally overrated “Atonement”), I do wish that the story being told were similarly inventive however. I also wish that the theatrical origins of the film a lot less obvious, with certain characters disappearing and re-appearing like they’re walking on and off stage. I find it distracting.

 

I’m not normally a fan of Olivia Colman as an actress, but she’s excellent here – far better than her Oscar-winning turn in the ghastly costume drama “The Favourite”. Anthony Hopkins perhaps didn’t deserve the Oscar for this performance, but it’s a fairly solid one nonetheless. What I like is that the character he plays isn’t soft and cuddly. For the most part he’s a stubborn and occasionally venomous prick. He just happens to also have dementia. So that was an interesting little difference from the norm, and one that is easily within Hopkins’ range as an actor. I wasn’t overly keen on the character Rufus Sewell played, it seemed like a cliché, through no fault of the actor’s. Some of the conversations about what to do with Hopkins etc., were also rather clichéd, and perhaps it couldn’t be avoided. However, it is a shame given that the overall storytelling device had some real invention in it. I also felt the final scene was better in theory than in execution, there was something a little unconvincing and inorganic about it that I can’t quite put my finger on.

 

Although it’s not a great film by a long stretch, there’s enough to commend here to get it – narrowly – across the line. Olivia Colman is particularly terrific, and the narrative device is clever. Here’s a film where audience confusion is strangely a positive.  

 

Rating: B-