Before we start, I couldn’t breathe while I waited for the Derek Chauvin verdict to be read today. And while I felt such a rush of relief to hear him declared guilty on all three counts, this was one day at the end of nearly a year of protests and outcry and public grief to wrest a shred of accountability for one murder in a sea of abuses of justice. I hope today is able to bring George Floyd’s family a modicum of peace, but it can’t return him to them, and there are so many people in this country who just want to be safe and treated like human beings. The work is far from over.
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Man, this Best Picture nominee packs a punch. It’s another one based on a play (plays are really getting shown the love this Oscar season – it’s almost like the pop-culture universe subconsciously balancing out the fact that we didn’t get the Tony Awards last year,) and it creates the world of its central character so effectively.
Anthony is dealing with dementia. His daughter Anne has been trying to find an effective carer for him, but Anthony keeps tossing them out, insistent that he doesn’t need any help. In the tiny world of his flat (or is it Anne’s?), Anthony wrestles with sorting out what he’s really seeing and what’s been distorted by his disordered memory.
The first thing that came to mind as I was watching this film was Tom Stoppard’s Travesties. One thing I’ve always loved about Stoppard is that, when he writes plays about historical events, he never presents his story as the be-all end-all of “what happened.” He casts doubt on his own narrative, using a variety of devices to make it clear that what we’re seeing isn’t the straight truth, and in Travesties, that device is his narrator’s dementia. The scenes skip like record tracks, jumping forward and backward in time, and we see stutterings of the same scenes multiple times with slight (or major) differences.
The Father is presented in very much the same way, handily earning its Best Adapted Screenplay nomination. While we get a handful of scenes that are clearly from Anne’s perspective, everything else is filtered through Anthony’s skewed, untrustworthy perceptions. We see the same scenes repeated more than once, sometimes with dialogue changes, sometimes in an unexpected order, sometimes word-perfect to the original but in a wholly different context. We also have two actors (credited in IMDb merely as “The Man” and “The Woman”) who pop up in the guise of characters we thought we knew; this Woman says she’s Anne and is calling Anthony “Dad,” but that’s not Anne’s face, is it? The whole thing is incredibly well-done. It’s such a visceral way to evoke Anthony’s state of mind, where he can’t make sense of what’s happening around him.
The character work is also marvelous, with each member of the small ensemble turning in excellent work. Our nominated performances are for Anthony Hopkins in his leading role as Anthony and Olivia Colman’s supporting work as Anne. I’m really, really impressed by Hopkins here. He does such a great job capturing the way Anthony is at a loss for much of what’s going on around him but so desperately tries to cover it up. He tries to bluff his way through so many conversations, hellbent on maintaining his dignity and his independence even as he can no longer trust what his own mind is telling him. Colman also does a fine job here. She and the rest of the supporting cast have the tricky task of delivering their performances filtered through the lens of Anthony’s shifting perceptions, and their characterizations are at times purposely-inconsistent. They’re supposed to throw us off, supposed to not quite align with what we saw from them before. Joining Colman are the always-great Rufus Sewell and Imogen Poots (who I loved as Jean Ross in Christopher and His Kind,) and Mark Gatiss (Mycroft!) and Olivia Williams (I first came to know her for her great work on Dollhouse, but she’s amazing in Miss Austen Regrets too) are individually fantastic as The Man and The Woman.
Warnings
Strong thematic elements, scenes of violence (including elder abuse,) language, and drinking.
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Finally, because I’m still riding high after that Shang-Chi trailer yesterday, this is your general reminder that Tony Leung Chiu-wai is cooler than you.
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