The Father
Director: Florian Zeller
Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Olivia Williams
Dementia can be a disaster. It is one of the most scary mental disabilities that mankind has been facing for years. Nothing can be more confounding than forgetting the face of a loved one. Nothing can be more confusing than losing one’s way and not being able to get back home. There have been several films about this, but most of them have lost their way, much like their characters, in the middle. Not The Father, which keeps us engaged till the very end.
Helmed by French playwright and novelist Florian Zeller, who steps into cinema with The Father (based on his own 2014 play), it is in the running for several Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor, etc. Essaying, well, The Father, is no less a giant than Anthony Hopkins, who came into my view in 1991 with his The Silence of the Lambs, portraying the horrific Hannibal Lecter. He won the Best Actor Academy Award. Later, I saw him in Howards End, Shadowlands, The Remains of the Day and most recently in Two Popes (2019).
Sir Anthony, a Welshman, takes a completely different path in Zeller’s work. He plays an 80-year-old man, who is fiercely independent – at least he thinks he can be – and has lost his wife and a daughter (in an accident, but he does not know about it). His is merry one moment, and mercurial the other, but all the time forgetful. He suffers from dementia.
His second daughter is Anne (Olivia Colman), who is divorced, and lives with him in their stately London home. Lately, she has found a man, a Frenchman, who works out of Paris, and he wants Anne to join him. However much the father, Anthony (Hopkins), may rave and rant that he is perfectly capable of looking after himself, he secretly wishes that Anne would not “abandon” him and push him into a nursing home (which in India we call old-age or retirement home).
But the poor woman, pulled in all directions, is in a dilemma. Her future is in Paris. She is no longer young, and this may well be her last chance to find a companion. She is also deeply fond of her father, who can be very difficult, sacking caregivers after abusing them – a kind of situation which people suffering from dementia find themselves in. They become cantankerous and have unbelievable mood-swings.
The Father is, well, the father’s story all the way, with some extraordinarily incisive acting by Hopkins. When he forgets where he has kept his wristwatch (‘I think the caregiver stole it,’ he tells Anne) and when he hallucinates and imagines her sitting with her husband (‘But I have been divorced for five years,’ she quips), one should watch the flashes of brilliance in the actor. He is simply par-excellence.
But will he walk away with the Oscar on the night of April 25, when the awards are announced? I have some doubts. True, Hopkins is in his eighties, but the late Chadwick Boseman in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is equally good, and the Academy voters may prefer him over the older man. However, we all know that the awards evening is perfectly capable of throwing up shocks and surprises.
Finally, returning to The Father, it is eminently watchable, with not one false step, and the man’s mental degeneration has been narrated with remarkable alacrity, and at the end when he cries in his nursing home room, “I want my mommy”, it is heart wrenching. Who else but Hopkins could have sunk so deeply into the character!
The Father may be a chamber piece, but in its 97-minute runtime, it twists and turns in so many unexpected ways that we just cannot take our eyes off the screen. And, it is really powerful, so powerful that it will make us pause and ponder over all those unhappy men and women who sink into dementia. And feel so lost and hopeless.
Rating: 5/5
(Gautaman Bhaskaran is movie critic and author of a biography of Adoor Gopalakrishnan)
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