The Father

Novelist, playwright and stage director Florian Zeller’s first film, The Father, based on his own acclaimed play, is not what I expected. It has been a tour-de-force, since it was translated by Christopher Hampton and produced for the stage, for Kenneth Cranham in the lead role on the English stage and for Frank Langella on Broadway. In 2016 Cranham won the Laurence Olivier Award and Langella won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. Anthony Hopkins, who gave up theater acting in 1989, was the natural choice for the role in the film, and Florian Zeller himself chose to direct it. Hopkins won this year’s Best Actor Academy Award, beating out the favorite, Chadwick Boseman, who was expected to be awarded posthumously. 

When the film opens with Olivia Coleman striding toward her London flat, we hear the “The Cold Song” from Purcell’s King Arthur (“I can scarcely move Or draw my breath”) and when we enter the flat we find an old man is listening to it on headphones. He is Anthony who lives in his daughter Anne’s (Olivia Coleman) flat, which he thinks is his flat. He has driven his latest carer away because he believes she stole his watch (he simply misplaced it). Anne announces she is moving to Paris to be with a man. But then Anthony, who is alone in the flat, hears a noise and finds a strange man is there. He is Paul (Mark Gatiss), Anne’s husband, but Anthony doesn’t recognize him. When Anne returns, she is someone else (Olivia Williams). Anthony is visibly disturbed by the confusion of faces, but pretends he is fine. Later Paul becomes someone else (Rufus Sewell). 

What the hell is going on? Anthony thinks they must be playing a joke on him, but he doesn’t find it funny. Everything is presented to us so directly that we know we aren’t watching a surrealist joke in a Buñuel film. Buñuel used two actresses in the same role in his last film, but no one in the film noticed the difference. Surrealism establishes its own normalcy and logic. This isn’t surreal, but it’s somewhat confusing and, for Anthony, it’s a serious problem. 

The story continues like this, with the slightest transitions notifying us that time has passed. We see exactly what Anthony is going through as he is going through it. But then there are time slips, scenes back up, overlap, change perspectives, almost as if Anthony’s mind is searching for the missing junctures, trying to put things back together that his mind has broken up. The scenes call to mind the middle two stanzas of Philip Larkin’s terrifying poem “The Old Fools”: 

 At death, you break up: the bits that were you 

 Start speeding away from each other for ever 

 With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true: 

 We had it before, but then it was going to end, 

 And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour 

 To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower 

 Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend 

 There’ll be anything else. And these are the first signs: 

 Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power 

 Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it: 

 Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines – 

 How can they ignore it? 

 Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms 

 Inside your head, and people in them, acting. 

 People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms 

 Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning, 

 Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting 

 A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only 

 The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning, 

 The blown bush at the window, or the sun’s 

 Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely 

 Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live: 

 Not here and now, but where all happened once. 

With dementia, the bits that were you depart slowly, well before you die, leaving you in a helpless, bewildered state, unable any more to recognize your family or your surroundings. 

As I said, The Father isn’t what I expected. What I was expecting was something like what Dwight Macdonald wrote about Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite: “the most unrhetorical cinema I have ever seen... in presenting life from the viewpoint of a child, with the baffling transitions, the obscure motivations, the poetic daze of adult life as it appears to a sensitive child, achieving a kind of direct realism which is so lacking in the literal-dramatic conventions we are used to that it has a surrealist effect.” 

Of course, what I expected The Father to show was what Larkin called the “inverted childhood” of old age, in which one doesn’t build on experience but is slowly divested of it. I expected something closer to a guided tour of a dementia victim’s world from the inside, from his perspective. The film gives us glimpses, fleeting vignettes, scenes from a fracturing mind, but doesn’t go far enough. We remain on the frustrating fringes of the experience. 

Florian Zeller adapts his own play very respectfully, as I suppose he had a right to. As a first film, it is heavily dependent on the text. And why not? But when some critics compare The Father to Michael Haneke’s Amour, which is about a husband’s reactions to his wife’s stroke and her mental and physical decline, all I can say is it doesn’t add up. All Zeller really gives us are the fragments of a character whose pieces never fit together to make anything close to a whole. Anthony is disintegrating before our eyes, but we’re never allowed a glimpse of who he was before the disintegration started. Actors pop in and out and exchange identities arbitrarily. The arbitrariness is part of the puzzle, part of the awful process that afflicts Anthony. The film is steadfast and honest and doesn’t spare us the nastiness of dementia. Anne hangs on to her father, she keeps him with her for as long as she can until the effects of his helplessness begin to smother whatever joy there is in her own life. When she finally places Anthony in a nursing home it comes as something of a relief, since we have grown concerned for her well being, not so much his. 

The ravages of time and loss, how the simple process of continuing to live guarantees loss, is what I expected from The Father, but what it fails to give. Anthony Hopkins has been lauded but I found Olivia Colman far more compelling as Anne, the long-suffering daughter. The film is far too tasteful, too discreet. We are shown a glimpse of Anne trying to strangle Anthony. But she was merely daydreaming. Zeller’s model for his film was clearly Michael Haneke’s Amour, but he hasn’t any of Haneke’s powers of concentration, of framing and pacing. Haneke can show us something unspeakable with shocking coolness, with no trace of dramatic emphasis so that it seems almost commonplace – and all the more terrible. 

The Father is a carefully-wrought hall of mirrors in which we see Anthony Hopkins wander, looking for the way out. His Theseus has no thread to lead him out of the labyrinth. At the film’s close, Anthony cries for his “mummy” and collapses into the arms of his nurse (Olivia Williams) whom he once mistook for Anne. She comforts him, rocking him gently, murmuring comforting words, and the camera pans – discreetly – away to gaze out of a window at wind-stirred trees. ("The blown bush at the window.") The trees are moving, but The Father is not.