The Father

Starring Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman,The Father, co-written and directed by Florian Zeller and based on the latter’s 2012 play Le Père, is the story of how an intelligent, cultured, independent man can be brought low by the insidious disease of dementia and the effect his loss of agency inevitably has on his family.

The ‘action’ is played out (until the final scenes) within the confines a London flat and has a tiny cast. The main character is the ineffably charming and roguishly handsome Anthony, a man coming to the end of what has clearly been a happy and fulfilled life.

But we soon realise that he is in the late stages of dementia. There is much here that people familiar with the disease will recognise, the many and varied manifestations of age-related mental decline: random objects turning up in unexpected places, failure to recognise people and places with which the person was once intimately acquainted, the loss of perspective. We witness Anthony’s sudden bouts of aggression, his sudden, frightening mood changes and the capriciousness that is so typical of this condition. “I don’t like coffee” Anthony bawls at Anne when she brings him a gift of his favourite brand. He is also characteristically given to flights of fancy, telling the (would-be) new carer that he was a dancer in his young days. The more prosaic truth is that he had been an engineer.

But for all the oddities thrown up by Anthony’s condition, we also get glimpses of the man he was, with his love of books, good wine and opera. He lives in what he (and initially we) think is his own home. The truth – as happens repeatedly throughout this film – is not as it first seems. The flat in fact belongs to his daughter Anne, played by Olivia Colman, who has moved her father in in an attempt to manage his condition ‘in-house’. The film is about her eventual admission that she cannot cope and her gut-wrenching decision to move her father into a nursing home.

The film opens with the latest in a long line of attempts to find a suitable carer. At first all seems well when the delightful and well-meaning Laura, (played beautifully by Imogen Poots) appears for interview. Inevitably, Anthony blots his copybook – again – with his aggressive and unpredictable behaviour. So a place in a home is the only option left.

Coleman, at her lachrymose best, plays to perfection the role of long-suffering daughter, conflicted between her need to pursue her own happiness and her father’s increasingly complex needs. But her efforts to maximise her father’s happiness are not well-received. Convinced that his daughter is only after his flat, he is also fiercely opposed to any notion of being ‘helped’, flinging stinging accusations at Anne for being “heartless and manipulating”. On more than one occasion, Anthony compares her unfavourably with another daughter who we learn had died in an accident some years before. Anne is, throughout,  the embodiment of compassion and genuine concern but, as a brief but rather alarming fantasy sequence shows in which she dreams about smothering her father with a pillow, she is majorly conflicted. Coleman plays the part to perfection - who better than her to portray putting a brave face on a wretched and intractable situation?

 I think what makes this film so effective, and affecting, is that we get to see the world through Anthony’s eyes: the paranoia, confusion and impotence that dementia inevitably brings in its wake. He is aware that things aren’t right, but can’t quite put his finger on how. “There’s something funny going on” is as far as his inchoate analysis goes.

And, for a time, we in the audience know just what he means. Which of these people is really his daughter? Is the other daughter alive or dead? Is the flat his or Anne’s? All this is confusing to the audience… until the penny drops after the first 20 minutes or so of the film. Sadly, for the main character the fog never clears and he lurches from one mis-reading of events around him to another. The shifting perspective, with the main characters in his life-story constantly morphing into others (two different actresses take the roles of both Anne and her husband) serves to perfectly illustrate the confusion that reigns in Anthony’s head and forces us to witness at first hand his loosening grip on what is going on around him. Symbolic of his feeling of being ‘lost’ is his constant searching for his watch. He admits to feeling totally at sea without it. Having it safely on his wrist gives him at least the illusion that his life has some sort of shape and logic. Of course, ultimately, his timepiece is rendered useless as, typical for late-stage dementia patients, night and day gradually begin to merge and total disorientation takes hold.

This is a film that many will find difficult to watch but it is thought-provoking on a subject that will at some time touch us all. Impeccably acted, with great insight and empathy from all the main characters, Hopkins in particular is outstanding – no surprise then that he received the Academy Award for Best Actor (aged 83, no less) for what some regard as the performance of his career.

The final scene shows Anthony now installed in his care home, being cradled by a nurse as if he were a small child which, to all intents and purposes, is what he has become. At the end he asks the nurse: “Who exactly am I?”, a question that is central to the film… and indeed all our lives. As one critic said: ”[This] is a film about grief, and what it means to grieve for someone who is still alive.” Quite so.

 

Link to official trailer:  https://youtu.be/OFnoRaLAclg