Movies about dementia tend to be told from the perspective of those watching a loved one succumb to their disease rather than from that of those suffering from it. While this viewpoint is certainly understandable (dementia patients rarely write screenplays), it is rather one-sided. Feelings of anger, guilt, fear, and helplessness are easily recognizable on the faces of actors portraying distraught family members, but too often, their ailing counterparts simply stare listlessly into space and occasionally get lost or hurt themselves. Screenwriters and directors time and again forget that dementia patients are suffering too – that their feelings of fear and confusion are just as real as anyone’s, and that their pain also comes with a terrifying inability to adequately express or advocate for themselves.
In his debut feature The Father (based on his play, Le Père), director Florian Zeller breaks the mold by peering into the mind of one such sufferer, with often powerful results. Told through a series of events that take place in the apartment of an aging man named Anthony (Anthony Hopkins), The Father is, at first, cleverly disguised as an all too familiar story of a grump at odds with his daughter over his deteriorating health. But, before long, and as scenes are repeated using different actors, it becomes clear that not only is Anthony suffering from dementia, but that we are witnessing his demise from the inside rather than from without.
Anthony’s world seems completely rational to him (a frightening notion to consider when compared to other films that cover similar ground), and it’s in this realization that the film’s true heartbreak forms. Anthony can’t understand why he’s being treated in a way that implies he needs help when, to him, he’s as fit as a fiddle. Occasionally, he suspects something is amiss with his surroundings and the people in his life, but this confusion is quickly dashed by his clever wit, allowing him to rebound back into a workable, plausible explanation about why things may seem strange.
Hopkins delivers one of his best performances in years as he muddles and mumbles through his sometimes funny, often cerebral experience. With a wide range, he frequently and easily shifts from kind to hostile, to condescending and back again, providing the amazing ebb and flow of personality traits necessary to represent his unsettling ordeal and deteriorating mental capacity. His co-stars (of which there are very few, and include Olivia Colman, Rufus Sewel, Imogen Poots, Mark Gatiss, and Olivia Williams) each offer varying degrees of clarity and counterbalance to Anthony’s condition, but never get in his way or hinder the struggle taking place in his mind. And while it’s clear that they do exist, or at least did exist at some point in Anthony’s “real world,” to what capacity and at what point in his life is kept deliberately obscured by contradictory tellings of similar stories. In this regard, The Father isn’t as much about what people lose when faced with dementia, but about what they hold onto.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.