Mark Reviews Movies: THE FATHER

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 25, 2021

The true horror of the situation in which 80-year-old Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) finds himself might also be the situation's only blessing. He is losing his memory, his understanding of his surroundings, and his comprehension of time to dementia, brought about by an unknown condition—either Alzheimer's or some other affliction of the brain. Anthony doesn't know this. He is not capable of realizing it. In a strange way, that's the one glimmer of extremely minor hope about his predicament.

We almost have to search for some sign of hope in this film, because it is otherwise and wholly devastating. The Father, co-writer/director Florian Zeller's cinematic adaptation of his play, doesn't just show us the course of Anthony's life with dementia. It attempts and, through some simple but clever tricks of staging and editing, succeeds at giving us some sense of what it is like for this man—to awaken every day unaware of where and when he is, of who the people surrounding him are, and of what ideas in his head are real or just some deception of his mind.

Zeller, making an impressive feature debut, employs a sort of dream logic of the everyday and the mundane in his storytelling. Scenes play out and then play out again, perhaps exactly as they had before or maybe with some changes, either subtle or obvious. Phrases and moments repeat themselves, but the faces saying them and the backdrops in which they unfold may be completely different.

A character may walk out of a room, only for a new character, whose appearance may be familiar or entirely new to us, to enter, stating that the absent character is no longer even in the apartment. We just saw the person leave from the living room into the kitchen, and because Zeller takes his time to establish the layout of the story's primary space, we also know that there is no way for that complete exit from the apartment to be possible.

How did that happen? When did it happen? Why can't we figure out when and where all of these events are happening, and why does there seem to be no sense of reason or rhyme to why everything that already has happened seems to be happening over and over again?

The impact of all of this is overwhelming on a conscious and subconscious level. The intentional confusion builds and builds, first in small ways and progressively in more significant ones.

At the start (although, by the end, we're not entirely sure if the concept of "the start" means anything to this character anymore), Anthony lives alone in his nice and spacious London apartment. His daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) comes to visit—to check on him, as has become necessary.

The daughter wants him to have a caretaker during the day when she is at work, but Anthony can't stand the idea. He's convinced the last one stole his watch. He can't find it, and yes, he tells his daughter, he even looked in his secret hiding place. Anne immediately finds the timepiece there.

One of the wiser things about Zeller and co-writer Christopher Hampton's screenplay is that it doesn't attempt to evade or conceal the truth of Anthony's condition. One could imagine the same story, played in a similar fashion, but with the goal of transforming that truth into some kind of twist. Here, by the end of the first scene, we know exactly what Anthony is experiencing and, if not the physical cause of it, an understandable name for his affliction.

It's important to note this, because the film deals with some incredibly difficult subject matter. Zeller's approach to this story is filled with so many tricks and such a command of sleight-of-hand that one might worry his goal is within the act of intentional deception—that he's exploiting a terrible disease in order to show off his skills of snaking plotting, precise staging, and directing with misdirection in mind.

Those tricks, though, serve as the method for telling this story. They are not the ultimate aim, and that distinction is vital to note and assert.

Zeller wants us to experience something akin to the constant confusion, repeated frustration, and total uncertainty of someone living with dementia. As such, the film doesn't and necessarily cannot have something of a traditional plot. The story unfolds more in vignettes of Anthony, as he goes from one day to the next—or maybe one week or month or year to the next, for all we or he knows.

What we do know is that Anne is planning to move to France to be with a man she plans to marry. Maybe, we don't even know that much, since she has no clue what her father means whenever he mentions those plans. Indeed, shortly after meeting Anne, we seem to meet her again, since the name and basic personality remain the same but the character is now played by Olivia Williams—who, on a broad level, looks enough like Colman that we're momentarily disoriented but, on a specific level, looks nothing like her counterpart, making us even more so.

This Anne, unlike the divorced one who was first introduced, has a husband, who's played first by Mark Gatiss and after by Rufus Swell—neither of whom looks anything like the other. Imogen Poots appears as the caretaker who finally might win over Anthony, because she reminds him of a daughter who hasn't come to visit in a while.

The rest of the story unfolds in a kind of zigzag through time and many spaces, although they all look the same. Anthony forgets or misremembers more and more. Characters remind him of things we had forgotten, didn't know, or assumed were just false in the first place. It all comes together in a pair of scenes of shattering despair and loneliness—the only way this story could end but, still, emotionally wrecking ones.

A lot of that impact, beyond Zeller's commitment to his storytelling technique, comes from Hopkins' performance. He doesn't play a man turned frail and demoralized by his condition. His performance is full of playful, almost impish life, because, for all the character knows, Anthony's life is continuing as it should. To see that energy fade in an instant during the final act of The Father, though, is to fully feel the tragedy of this situation.

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