In an effort to watch as many Oscar-nominated projects as possible this year, I recently sat down with the French animated short Memorable, a lovely and bitterly sad film about a man fading away into Alzheimer’s. All its gentle lilt aside, it’s pretty harrowing, as most things about cognitive degeneration are—movies like Michael Haneke’s Oscar-nominated Amour, a devastatingly bleak film about dementia, or the Oscar-winning Still Alice, which is a bit sweeter in its portraiture but still kind of awful to watch. And now there’s The Father, which premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday. It’s a mix of the gnarly and the graceful, all anchored by what’s likely to be one of the standout performances of this year.
The actor behind it is Anthony Hopkins—excuse me, Sir Anthony Hopkins—maybe as venerable a British thespian as there is. Now in his 80s, Hopkins is enjoying a career resurgence sparked by his mysteriously menacing turn on HBO’s Westworld and then solidified by his Academy-recognized work in 2019’s The Two Popes. These have been refreshing returns to form for an actor who had, in the last decade or so, retreated a bit into the ease of his idiosyncratic shtick, much like one of his American equivalents, Al Pacino. The Father is the culmination of this new Hopkins era, a towering piece of acting that is as precise and exacting as it is enveloping. It reminds you of why Hopkins enjoys the venerated stature he has for so long.
It’s of course an immense help that everything surrounding him is so vividly, smartly realized as well. The film is directed by first-timer Florian Zeller, a lauded French playwright who here adapts his own smash-hit, internationally produced play. It’s an auspicious debut; The Father is expertly tailored, gliding around morosely as Hopkins’s Anthony (what a coincidence!) slips further into his fog. Zeller keeps his film as intimate as a stage play, but makes good use of cinema’s visual advantages. So much in the movie is about the recognition of physical space—paintings on walls and tiles on kitchen backsplashes quick signifiers that ground one in a familiar place. On film, that stuff can change quickly, seamlessly, giving us a sense of how terrifyingly easy it is for Anthony to lose his bearings. Sound-wise, Zeller uses a mix of classical opera selections and original compositions by the great Ludovico Einaudi to fill the film with ache and dread. At times, The Father plays like a horror film. Because, in essence, it is.
Attendant to Anthony’s decline is his daughter, Ann, played with weary concern and sensitivity by Olivia Colman. Well, sometimes she is. The trick, if you want to reduce it to that, of The Father is that the film’s reality shifts as Anthony’s does. Scenes loop around back onto one another. Faces and locations change and then revert back. Time bends, condensing and expanding. It’s hard to know when anything is happening.
Zeller at least allows us in the audience to piece together some kind of vague timeline of real events, but linear structure is largely eschewed. This is a nervy approximation of what dementia may actually feel like, the mundane suddenly shifting into the unknown. It’s a much more interesting approach to the subject matter than something straightforward would have been, allowing for the scary stuff to exist in startling concert with the sad.
Throughout all this distortion, Hopkins traverses a vast range. He goes from sweetly doddering to hectoring, charming to frightened, obstinate and then, sometimes, resigned to the limits of his failing perception. Hopkins sharply depicts the moments when Anthony realizes he doesn’t know who someone is or what exactly is happening, but doesn’t want to let on that he’s at sea. This is such a bitingly, sorrowfully accurate rendering of how Alzheimer’s can manifest in its middle stages—moments of clarity and pride that are intense, fleeting, and then irretrievable. As Anthony’s condition worsens, Hopkins avoids enfeebled cliches while still potently communicating just how far gone Anthony really is. It’s shattering stuff.