Final Exit

The Father is more than an Alzheimer's problem picture

(The Oscars are next weekend and, as I do every year, I’m reviewing the Best Picture contenders before the ceremony. So far for 2021 I have Mank, The Trial of the Chicago 7,  Judas and the Black Messiah, Nomadland and Promising Young Woman handled. Almost done!)

There’s a late Ionesco play called Exit the King which starts off in the bizarrely comic vein we’re accustomed to from the great absurdist. Not only is the titular King’s realm disintegrating — originally its population was “nine thousand million,” but war, disease, and environmental ruin have winnowed it to about a thousand — but the few remaining young are aging at an incredible rate; “repatriated at 25, two days later and they’re over 80.” The King himself is disintegrating, too, but he won’t admit it. He claims his limbs are only stiffening because the castle is drafty, and that no one listens to his commands because they’re disloyal or inept, not because, as we soon learn, the kingdom and the king are one and the same, and simultaneously becoming incoherent and passing out of existence. The King rages against it — “why was I born if it wasn't for ever?” — but eventually, without ever really reckoning with what’s happening, becomes somnolent, abstracted, childish, imbecilic; his discarded first wife, the last human in attendance on him, gently talks him through his final passage.

It’s not a direct equivalent of The Father, but the movie pulled the Ionesco into my memory (I hadn’t read it in decades), in part because it started as a play by Florian Zeller (who also directed the film and co-wrote it with the British playwright Christopher Hampton), and retains some flavor of the stage, with its reliance on dramatic confrontation and disregard for the outside world. (For more than one reason, there’s very little “opening up.”) And it also has, I think, the same goal, or at least the same focal point on a far horizon, having to do with the end of everything around us and its relationship to the end of ourselves.

The movie starts straightforwardly enough with a middle-aged woman coming to a London flat and confronting her elderly (apparent) father with apparent memory problems about a contretemps with a caretaker who was apparently assigned to him and that he had apparently mistreated (“She said you called her a little bitch.” “I don’t remember”). The scene, with fluid, believable dialogue and crackerjack playing by Olivia Colman as Anne and Anthony Hopkins as Anthony, is of obvious quality and intrinsic interest, and you may at that point settle in for an Alzheimer’s problem picture, like an old-fashioned TV movie about some current social issue. It may even be that the old man’s assertion that the carer has stolen his watch isn’t, as you might have assumed, a delusion, so maybe there’s some more drama to be found there.

But The Father pulls a fast one. First (light spoiler) we see a woman who mildly resembles Olivia Colman come in and treat Anthony as if he’s her senile father, and at first we’re as surprised as he is. We adjust, and he adjusts. (“Oh, I see.”) But there are more surprises in store for him.

I said The Father felt like a play, but it is fully a film and Zeller and especially his production designer Peter Francis make great use of spaces that resemble one another sufficiently that Anthony’s confusion becomes more understandable — because we aren’t accustomed to the setting, it could be we’re misremembering where he is, too. And like a play it is somewhat claustrophobic, leaving us shut up with these characters. There is a lovely bit where Anthony (and sometimes Anne) keeps going to a window and looking out; what they see is, objectively, the outside world, but over time you get the feeling that they are only looking at pictures from their own memories.

All the acting is first-rate and rewards the attention: Colman, for example, whose many layers of disappointment are at moments pierced by sorrow, and Olivia Williams, who slides from doppelganger daughter to a person who is, well, who is just there. Hopkins’ performance is very true, the way a great theatrical performance is — it’s largely an aria, he does most of the talking, but he is always reacting to the situation and the other characters, and we can see him reacting also to his own disorientation, of which the shifting realties we are shown are just reflections. Hopkins is very deep inside of it, never angling for our understanding or trying to guide our reaction. His character is sometimes unlikable, even vicious, and it’s easy to forget that he’s demented, just as it must be for his loved ones. But we learn patience and sympathy for him; empathy too if we’re so inclined. He is headed where you would imagine such a character is headed — just as we all are, one way or another.