Originally published February 2021
I seem to forget every year that the amount of hype a film receives during award season is no real indicator of its actual impressiveness. The Father, directed by Florian Zeller and starring Anthony Hopkins, has had barely any fanfare as the Oscars have approached, so when I finally readied to see it, I expected, based on the lukewarm buzz around it (and the boring title), a conventional, slow paced drama. Instead, I was treated to my favorite film of the year.
The Father unmistakably dwarfs most of its more celebrated nominees in inventiveness, honesty, and even empathy, demonstrating superior craftsmanship and an incredibly moving acting performance.
The world of The Father is a crumbling world, owing to the failing mind of its perceiver. The key to understanding the movie’s structure is realizing that Zeller, instead of simply presenting a series of random, jumbled experiences and proclaiming it the experience of dementia, has instead placed the onscreen episodes into a highly tenuous narrative, which, as becomes evident throughout the movie, is the narrative that the protagonist, Anthony, has laboriously constructed in an effort to make some sense of what is happening to him.
Unfortunately, all Anthony has available to him to construct this narrative are unreliable fragments of memory, so the best he can do is scramble them into a weak thread of mysterious persecution by unclear parties, and even this can’t fully account for the many discrepancies that continue to frustrate him throughout the film. The retrospective nature of what we have been watching becomes clear when we realize that nurses in Anthony’s new nursing home have been infiltrating scenes that took place well before he met them: his present has bled into his past, and he can’t separate the two.
It’s an ingenious setup, and I’m already looking forward to when I can see this movie again, so that I can try to trace the (faulty) connections between the scenes that Anthony uses to place them in (incorrect) order. I don’t think this will be an impossible task, because Zeller has mercifully provided us with one reliable overseer of events: Anthony’s alarmed daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman). A few scenes take place from her point of view, and these are verifiably true, although they also appear in the jumbled order decreed by Anthony’s nonsense narrative, such that we see Anne buying a chicken at the store long after we’ve seen other episodes during which we know that the chicken has already been brought home. The trick, then, will be to use what we know for sure, from Anne, to discern what, in Antony’s struggling mind, is false.
I don’t know how valuable any praise of Anthony Hopkins’ performance is, since it speaks so obviously well for itself. But safe to say, it’s extraordinary. More than extraordinary. Anyone who has had a family member or worked with an individual with dementia will recognize the out of place witticisms, the showy bluster, the matter-of-fact rambling, the sudden and uncharacteristic ferocity, the too-absurd tall tales, the startled, vacant stare.
By all accounts, the Best Actor Oscar this year will go, posthumously, to Chadwick Boseman. And indeed, Boseman has earned recognition. But let this rightful commemoration of Boseman’s achievements, both the ones we remember and the ones that were sure to come, not avert us from the other great performances turned in this year, especially this masterpiece from a fellow acting legend, one of the great talents in all of movie history.
This has been a year of small movies rather than grand, sweeping visions: fitting, since we lived 2020 in such little worlds. Fitting also, then, that The Father, smallest of them all, is also the best. The admittedly worthy argument against its candidacy for Best Picture is that this isn’t the time for it: that now is simply a moment in history for other films to shine. Judas and the Black Messiah, for example, explores with raw authenticity the conflict between police and political revolutionaries, so relevant to today’s current events. Nomadland follows, less skillfully in my opinion, the economically displaced of rural America, another story undeniably in need of telling.
These films have been described, with some truth, as “urgent.” But when, then, will be the urgent time to tell about the Anthonys of the world? More forgotten than anyone, no movements will be dedicated to them; no one will rally in their name. Zeller, though, knows that our engagement will be elsewhere: for his last shot, he pans to the trees outside the nursing home—the ones, unlike poor Anthony, with all their leaves, bright and bustling in the wind, going on amongst themselves with the business of being alive: business that Antony, who’ll have to content himself with a walk among them in the park later on, isn’t quite an important part of, anymore.
—Jim Andersen
For more reviews, see my praise for Judas and the Black Messiah.