What I’m watching: a sobering drama about dementiaDate: 4/26/2021 Dementia is a heavy and sobering topic to explore on film; it is a disease terrible enough to provoke existential questions about identity and memory, and irremediable enough to make those same questions only weigh heavier with the passage of time. Perhaps that explains why not many movies about dementia and Alzheimer’s get made and released. Not only do we typically want the movies to distract us from life’s troubles – among which medical concerns loom large – but it’s also a tricky thing to tell a story about a character coping with a problem that has no permanent solution.
In “The Father,” Florian Zeller’s adaptation of his own French play “Le Père,” that narrative challenge is approached by placing the audience directly in the unreliable mind of its main character, the sick octogenarian Anthony (Anthony Hopkins). The film, through this perspective, achieves a degree of closeness with its protagonist that you rarely see in any movie, and certainly not in a movie about dementia. The result is a tumultuous and frightening family drama, and a grueling portrait of a loved one battling his own fall into translucence.
The initial impression we get of Anthony’s circumstances seems simple: he lives quietly and peacefully in his labyrinthine London flat, though is constantly tended to by his loving, exhausted daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) and a slew of professional caretakers that he has shooed away in sequence – he insists he doesn’t need them. But this reality, as believable as it is, is presented to us before the film shows its devilish hand, and it soon becomes clear that everything isn’t as it seems. Anthony’s world, and ours by association, is in a state of flux; nothing seems to be permanent or even logical.
In an early scene, for instance, Anne informs Anthony that she is moving to Paris to live with a man she’s met, and won’t be able to care for him regularly anymore. Anthony mentions this at a doctor’s appointment later on, only for Anne to ask what he is talking about. Soon after, Anthony encounters a strange man (Mark Gatiss) sitting leisurely in the flat’s living room, as if he owns the place. But the man identifies himself as Paul, and he claims to be Anne’s husband. The revelation is jarring and concerning, but quickly one-upped when Anne arrives at the flat, spontaneously played by a different actor (Olivia Williams). Paul, too, is suddenly recast (Rufus Sewell).
It’s an intricate and rather upsetting game Zeller plays by presenting the story in such a disorienting way, but it allows us a direct understanding of the anger and fear Anthony feels. When he viciously demands to know who this other woman pretending to be Anne is, we don’t see him as a person suffering from dementia, because we have the exact same lack of clarity. The projections of Anthony’s mind appear as crystalline in the film as the scenes depicting the “truth,” to a point where we are as hopeless of discerning between the two as he is.
Moreover, by seeing things as they appear to Anthony, the viewer also experiences a similar, frustrating volatility to what his loved ones and caregivers must also feel from the other side of his decline. Colman gives a heartbroken and vulnerable performance as Anne, who is running on empty from the beginning of the film. Zeller occasionally allows the film to run through her perspective, taking brief respites from Anthony’s mania to focus on her feelings of stress and isolation. She would make for a worthy and compelling main character, and would almost certainly be in that role if this film were constructed any differently.
But as it is, and like so many of the veteran actor’s previous works, this is Anthony Hopkins’ show. In a powerful lead performance that’s been nominated for virtually everything during this awards season, the Welsh master realizes the disorienting structure of the film and delivers a frightened character we can empathize with through the chaos. We are used to seeing Hopkins, particularly in the post-Hannibal Lecter phase of his career, as characters in positions of considerable intellect and power: he has played Nixon and John Quincy Adams, King Lear and Titus Andronicus, Picasso, Alfred Hitchcock, and Pope Benedict XVI. He was Odin in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the Godlike inventor Ford in HBO’s Westworld.
The natural, dignified ethos he brought to those roles gets flipped on its head in “The Father,” in which his character must deal with an increasingly elusive sense of both the world and himself.
The film showcases the master actor at his most vulnerable, directly facing the throes of age and mortality as crippling and unavoidable facts of life. Anthony has vacillating emotions and a wayward temper which are, to us and to him, the justified reactions to such an uncertain, fluctuating world. His personality shifts ceaselessly with his surroundings; there are powerful scenes involving speeches, tears and abject dread, but I think Hopkins does his best work as the brighter and quippier version of Anthony. His terror isn’t absent from these quieter scenes, but rather relegated to quick expressions of doubt and confusion behind a congenial facade.
Take, for instance, the deliciously uncomfortable scene where Anthony meets and socializes with Laura (Imogen Poots), his newest caretaker. He initially charms her with a friendly pouring of jokes and false recollections of being a tap-dancer, but the meeting instantly turns uncomfortable when his personality switches to accusatory and defensive, especially towards Anne, who can only apologize for her father. The scene, like many in the film, is well acted all-around but ultimately carried by Hopkins’ innate ability to be the most powerful, impactful figure on the screen.
When thinking about “The Father,” I immediately consider all the ways in which a film so meticulously designed and performance-driven could go wrong at some point in the creative process. But Zeller has successfully crafted a film about dementia that does something fundamentally different and considerably more intense with the subject than we are used to seeing.
|
