Searching for words or names is a familiar phenomenon affecting many people who struggle to find the descriptive noun for familiar everyday objects and experiences. What was the name of that actor? What is that restaurant that serves vegetable curry? What is that thing I use on my teeth every night?  Oh yes, it’s dental floss. The sometimes slow-moving descent into memory loss is fascinatingly unveiled in writer/director Florian Zeller’s film The Father, co-written with Christopher Hampton, based on the director’s 2012 play Le Père, which premiered in Paris, subsequently winning the Molière Award for Best Play.

The film begins with opera music, which is part of Ludovico Einaudi’s  soundtrack interspersed throughout the film and includes some of the most famous arias such as “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s Norma. The camera moves slowly through a beautiful flat in London settling on Anthony (Sir Anthony Hopkins) seated in a chair wearing headphones listening to opera. His daughter Anne, sensitively played by Olivia Colman, enters with bags of groceries and at first we think she is visiting her dad in his flat. She is kind and solicitous and talks to him about the need for a carer.* Having fired three caretakers he is dug in and insists that he doesn’t want any help and is positive the last one stole his watch. Anne is very patient and tells him she’s going to look for the watch in his favorite hiding place in the bathroom and indeed that is where she finds it. He puts the watch on his wrist without saying a word.  His daughter asks him if he’s taken his pills and it becomes clear that there’s something on her mind. Sitting down next to him she takes his hand and tells him she’s moving to Paris with her boyfriend to which he replies, “They don’t speak English in Paris.” This is one of many scenes where Anthony’s reality is fractured into many pieces of a giant puzzle that he is trying to somehow unify. In the kitchen, he unpacks groceries and stops for a moment saying, “Is anybody there?” There is a man sitting in the living room and Anthony thinks it’s Paul, (Mark Gatiss) Anne’s husband.  He asks him if he and Anne are divorced and reveals to him that she is moving to Paris with her boyfriend and is worried about what will become of him.

Despite his altered reality, Anthony senses that, “There’s something funny going on” and trying to protect himself, emphasizes, “I am absolutely not going to a facility.” A new caretaker by the name of Laura, played by Imogen Poots, is introduced and for just a few minutes we see Anthony as he must have been in his earlier life – happy, playful, funny, and joyful. He tells her that she’s beautiful and that his daughter is trying to steal his flat.  Knowing his resistance to having a caretaker, Laura engages him in conversation asking what he did before he retired.  He does a few dance steps and says “I was a dancer.” Anne quietly corrects him reminding him that he was an engineer. Having enough, he goes to his room leaving the two women alone. His daughter breaks down in tears at how this once vibrant, successful man is now traveling headlong into senility. Later that evening, she lovingly sits down on his bed but he doesn’t immediately recognize her and once again says he can’t find his watch. There are difficult conversations between Anne and her real husband Paul, well played by Rufus Sewell. He is losing patience with Anthony living in their flat and taking up so much of his wife’s time and energy. He wants to travel and they had to cancel their last trip. Dad gets agitated as he overhears the conversation between Anne and Paul who wants to put him in a facility. There are two scenes that are particularly compelling where no dialogue is necessary: In one scene Anthony is wandering through the flat that is growing more and more unfamiliar as objects like pictures and furniture look differently than he remembers. The other heartbreaking scene is where Anne sees him trying to figure out how to put on his sweater. With the patience of a saint, she quietly helps him and then tenderly touches his cheek.

With the now rapid descent into a black hole, he asks his daughter “What about me?  Who exactly am I?”  And in his profound confusion, he breaks down crying, “I want my mommy.”

In closing, I wish to reiterate that The Father is not an easy film and for some it might be too close for comfort.  However, despite the difficult subject matter, the performances delivered by Academy Award winners Sir Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman are absolutely riveting and they should probably make room on their mantles for another Oscar.

THE FATHER

A French-British Production

Director: Florian Zeller
Screenplay:  Christopher Hampton & Florian Zeller
Production Company:  F comme Film, Trademark Films Cine@
Cinematographer: Ben Smithard
Music:  Ludovico Einaudi
Editor: Yorgos Lamprinos

Distributors: Sony Pictures Classics (Domestic)
United Kingdom: (Lionsgate)

Language: English
Running Time:  97 minutes

Release Dates:
Domestic: December 18, 2020
United Kingdom: January 8, 2021

*British word for caretaker

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Director:

Writers: James Goldman (screenplay), James Goldman (play)

Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe

Music: John Barry

Cast: Peter O’Toole, Katharine Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins, John Castle, Nigel Terry, Timothy Dalton, Jane Merrow

The Lion in Winter – A Look Back

By Walt Mundkowsky

Every chronicle play is a reduction of history. In a great chronicle play, this reduction means compression of events, intensity, selection — an artistic vision of history; Marlowe’s Edward II concentrates 24 years (1307-1330) into five credible acts. The Lion in Winter is another sort of reduction: It diminishes a struggle for the English crown into situation comedy. Since James Goldman wrote the original play as well as the movie script, the inanity of the former is preserved in the latter.

The action takes place at Christmas, 1183. King Henry II of England (Peter O’Toole) decides to name his successor; his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn), whom he has imprisoned for 10 years, joins him. So do his sons — Richard the Lion-Hearted, the scheming Geoffrey, and nitwit John. Also present are 17-year-old King Philip of France (Timothy Dalton) and his sister, Princess Alais (Jane Merrow), who is Henry’s mistress. Early on Henry says of Eleanor: “She knows I want John on the throne and I know she wants Richard.” The rest of the film is the clash of their wills. At the end of the holiday nothing has been resolved, and Eleanor is returned to her confinement. Henry tells her, “You know, I hope we never die.” Eleanor: “I hope so, too.” Henry: “You think there’s any chance of it?” The movie ends with both of them laughing boisterously as her barge pulls away.

Problems inherent in this stuff are nearly insuperable; drama in which character is constantly sacrificed to the quip cannot be substantial, especially when both fall as flat as they do here. One-liners like “Has my willow turned to poison oak?” and “Well — what shall we hang? The holly or each other?” are plentiful, and Goldman plops a speech loaded with big ideas into the bitchy infighting (“I’ve found how good it is to write a law or make a tax more fair or sit in judgment to decide which peasant gets a cow. There is, I tell you, nothing more important in the world. (…) I am sick of war”). Modern locutions clang all over — “Fragile I am not; affection is a pressure I can bear.” Goldman’s attempt at history’s verdict sits uneasily, containing as it does a compliment to himself (Henry’s “My life, when it is written, will read better than it lived”).

Anthony Harvey’s direction supplies the coup de grâce. His first film, Dutchman (1966), contrived to coarsen the LeRoi Jones play — no small achievement. I cannot imagine how that prepared him for this, but the toolbox of arty clichés runs unchecked. The film opens with a shot of the sky; suddenly crossed swords meet in the frame — cut to a close-up of Henry. “Come for me!” he shouts. As it turns out, he is just dueling with John. Or, after threatening to disinherit all his sons, Henry collapses next to a castle wall, the camera zooming back until he becomes a tiny, almost imperceptible figure. Several scenes begin with burning candles or torches; much of the film has a murky look, as if Harvey is trying to establish a Medieval visual style. Annoying overuse of the zoom lens emphasizes his priorities; the movie isn’t allowed to unfold naturally. The camera zooms in from long shot to close shot, or zooms out from irrelevant close-up (a fist knocking on a door, the beak of a stone bird) to establishing shot, rather than taking us swiftly to the heart of the scene. Sometimes Harvey reminds us of other, better films — the gargoyles in close-up behind the opening titles are not unlike those at the end of A Man for All Seasons. But what worked there — cutting from the sound of the headsman’s axe to the camera tracking silently past darkened gargoyles, accompanied by dry narration — is mere affectation here: unrelated to what follows.

This picture carries the marks of respectability and money. Peter Murton’s art direction and Margaret Furse’s costume design couldn’t be bettered. The music of John Barry has its moments (the opening credits, the choral elements) but is often sticky. A book would be necessary for Douglas Slocombe’s camera triumphs (he passed away in 2016, aged 103). His restrained work for Harvey makes eloquent use of dark, rich colors. I’d put some cornball set-ups on the director. (“May I watch you kiss her?” Eleanor asks. In the foreground, Henry in right profile and Alais in left, facing each other; in the background, Eleanor facing the camera. Henry and Alais embrace. The camera zooms past them into a close-up of the weeping Eleanor.)

O’Toole’s Henry is elusive (many effects, scant continuity or line), with Hepburn always on the verge of bursting into tears, every speech like a lecture. Can an Oscar be far behind? The sons Richard and John aren’t much help, but John Castle makes an adequately oily Geoffrey, perhaps a bit lacking in the “wheels and gears” Henry speaks of. He does contribute a nice touch, however. “Be Richard’s chancellor,” Eleanor proposes. “Rot,” he answers, gliding away. I have never heard a more mellifluous “Rot.”

To escape the continual racket from the leads, we turn to Jane Merrow’s Alais, a gentle creature fiercely refusing to be used by anyone. Her pleas to her lover (“You mustn’t play with feelings, Henry. Not with mine”) and to his wife (“You love Henry but you love his kingdom, too. You look at him and you see cities, acreage, coastline, taxes. All I see is Henry. Leave him to me, can’t you?”) touch us if not her listeners. Timothy Dalton is her equal as the young French king. His part is small but multi-faceted — unsure of himself on the surface (“I am a king; I’m no man’s boy”) but possessing a natural gift for intrigue, cold and calculating beyond his years. Had the whole enterprise been infused with the feeling and smarts of Dalton’s acting, we’d have something.

I’ll take O’Toole’s “Henry II, Part I” by no great margin. That would be Becket (1964).

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