‘I feel as if I’m losing all my leaves…‘
Ageing is life’s great secret. When people get too old they end up stuck in a home. Patronised at every turn. Ignored. Belittled. And yet we sweep this great indignity under the carpet because it hides the inconvenient truth. One day, that will be us. Every person reading this will grow old and forgetful. The less fortunate among us will grow old and develop dementia, the subject of this film. Some of us won’t grow old at all. Time truly waits for no man, and mortality is a fickle beast.
Cinema largely chooses to ignore the subject of ageing. There simply isn’t an audience for it. To blow up the ageing process on the big screen is to lend it credibility. To expose the lie that only other people grow old. The Father has no interest in saving your feelings. It has no interest in bending the truth. This is life and death and growing old in all its merciless finality. It’s forgetting who you are and why you are and what is going on around you. It’s having every piece of dignity stripped away until there is nothing left but a confused old man sat in his pyjamas. Most of all, it’s masterful cinema…
Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) is living through dementia under the caring gaze of his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman). Despite enlisting the help of home carer Laura (Imogen Poots), Anne struggles to cope with Anthony’s ever changing moods and constant confusion and so she begins to consider, under duress from her partner Paul (Rufus Sewell), whether her father would be better suited to a nursing home.
Well… watching that was quite the journey. Fortunately, my first hand experience with dementia is pretty limited, but I’ve heard enough about it from the experiences of others to know that Florian Zeller, directing this film adaptation from his own play, does an incredible job in demonstrating what life could be like for somebody suffering with dementia. Anthony loses days, faces and, almost every ten minutes or so, his watch. Mark Gatiss and Olivia Williams flit in and out of the action playing various roles as Anthony struggles to distinguish between those around him. Hopkins portrays this heart-breaking bewilderment with a performance that genuinely has to be seen to be believed. ‘Moving’ doesn’t do justice to what the Welsh maestro manages to pull out of the bag here. The legendary actor is hypnotically spectacular throughout The Father, pulling off multiple facets of an insidious disease in a truly sublime performance. It’s hard to imagine many actors in the history of cinema pulling off a turn as breath-taking as this one, and when Hopkins eventually takes home his second Academy Award (as he surely will come the end of April) it will be utterly, inarguably deserved.
A word too for his supporting cast. Coleman is magnificent as always, here taking a step back to allow Hopkins to take centre stage, Poots is an utter joy as ever; hopefully this will lead to more prestigious roles befitting her talent in the future, and both Gatiss and Sewell do a great job as physical manifestations of abuse and cruelty. The Father is at times a painful watch, but dementia is painful. Indeed, growing old is painful.
With his first cinematic directing credit, Zeller has produced a work that is bold, pioneering and utterly vital. A truly mesmerising film.