Florian Zeller’s impressive film The Son stars Jackman

A troubled teenager wants to move in with his Dad, superbly played by Hugh Jackman, and his new family in The Son.

Australian actor Hugh Jackman in The Son

The Son (M)
In cinemas from Thursday
★★★★

French novelist and film director Florian Zeller is clearly fascinated by the dynamics of families. The author of several successful plays, Zeller is best known for his trilogy – La mere (The Mother), first performed on stage in Paris in 2010, Le pere (The Father), staged in 2012, and Le fils (The Son), in 2018. The three plays were also staged successfully in London and New York and the latter two have been filmed. Zeller himself adapted and directed The Father (2020), a film that was distinguished by a memorable Oscar-winning performance from Anthony Hopkins, and he has now followed that with The Son which, while perhaps not quite as gripping as its predecessor, is still a very impressive achievement.

The title character in The Mother suffers from depression; The Father was about dementia; The Son centres on a troubled teenager and his difficult relationship with his parents.

Peter Miller (Hugh Jackman) is a successful New York lawyer whose first marriage to Kate (Laura Dern) ended some time previously; he now has a new wife, Beth (Vanessa Kirby) and a baby son. Peter seems very comfortable with his life, until late one night Kate arrives at his apartment to tell him she’s worried about their son, 17-year-old Nicholas (Zen McGrath), who has ­apparently skipped school for the past month. “He scares me” she says.

Nicholas is clearly very troubled indeed. He feels that he’s “not like other people” and that he’s in constant pain. “Life is weighing me down,” he tells his dad. “I want something to change, but I don’t know what.”

He says that he wants to leave the home of his mother and come to live with Peter and Beth, although as Peter has a demanding job – and is seriously considering organising a political campaign – a lot of the responsibility will inevitably fall on Beth. And the relationship between the boy and his stepmother is tricky: “When you met my dad did you know he was married?” Nicholas asks an embarrassed Beth.

As it turns out, Nicholas attends a new school for just one day before playing truant again. He seems to have no friends and no hobbies – he is just a void. Peter tries desperately to get through to the boy but the barriers that Nicholas throws up seem insurmountable. There’s a brief moment of hope in a lovely scene in which Beth encourages Peter to show his son his dance moves to the tune of It’s Not Unusual, but that proves to be a brief respite and Nicholas’s problems only become worse.

One of the film’s key scenes involves a meeting between Peter and his father (Anthony Hopkins is very impressive in just one scene) where old tensions are reignited. The old man, a veteran politician who lives in a smart Washington house with the stuffed head of a stag featured prominently on the wall, is intolerant of his son’s problems; while Peter seriously tries to get through to Nicholas and to help him, his father is brutal in his put-downs.

Peter means well, but he’s a workaholic who spends most of his time in his city office, which boasts spectacular views of Manhattan, in addition to which the temptation of a political career promises that he’ll spend even less time with Beth, the baby and, crucially, Nicholas. Despite his best efforts Peter is out of his depth – he just can’t seem to get through to the boy.

Statistics show that all over the Western world, including Australia, teenagers like Nicholas who find difficulty in coping with the modern world are resorting to self-harm.

That’s the bitter truth underlying this sober and important film.

As there was in The Father, there’s a Zeller “trick” in which the audience is momentarily disoriented, led in one direction only to discover that the rug has been pulled from under its feet. This device successfully ratchets up the tension and emotional impact of the film.

The original French dialogue has been adapted into an English screenplay with the collaboration of Christopher Hampton and, like The Father (in retrospect a quite remarkable film debut from a stage director), The Son is immaculately acted and staged.

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The Whale (M)
In cinemas
★★★★

Like The Son, The Whale is based on a stage play and deals, at least in part, with the difficult relationship between a father and his child. Produced on the New York stage in 2012, Samuel D. Hunter’s drama, which he has adapted for the screen, focuses on the character of Charlie, a magnificent, Oscar-nominated Brendan Fraser.

Charlie is an obese academic who still teaches students by Zoom, though he pretends that his laptop camera is broken so that the kids won’t see what he really looks like. He lives alone in his small, dingy apartment, and consumes vast amounts of junk food (watching Charlie hungrily devouring pizzas is enough to put you off such things forever!)

Charlie is so huge that he can barely lift himself out of his chair. His carer is Liz (Hong Chau who is nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar) with whom he shares a difficult history. Her brother, Alan, had been a student of Charlie’s and the pair had become lovers; as a result Charlie had left his wife Mary (Samantha Morton) and eight-year-old daughter, Ellie, who is now a bitterly alienated 17-year-old, portrayed by Sadie Sink. Although they live in the same Idaho town, Mary has seen to it that Charlie has had no contact with Ellie in the intervening years, but now the teenager shows up at her father’s apartment, not so much to get to know him as to abuse him (“You’re disgusting,” she tells him). Alan has died some time earlier.

In addition to the three women who come to Charlie’s apartment there is Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a missionary from the New Life Church, which just happens to be the religious establishment over which Liz’s father had presided. Thomas arrives just as Charlie is having a bad attack and, thinking that he’s dying, Charlie implores the young man to read to him a student essay on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the significance of which will eventually become clear (and which explains the film’s title).

All the actors are very good but Fraser, under a ton of prosthetic make-up, is outstanding. The actor, who stands a decent chance of winning the Oscar, beautifully conveys the pain and regret that poor Charlie is suffering. Arguably the plotting of this filmed play is a shade schematic, but it doesn’t seem to matter as the drama, meticulously directed by Darren Aronofsky, is so powerful.

The decision to photograph the film in the pre-widescreen 1.33 ratio adds to the feeling of claustrophobia (almost all of the film takes place in the apartment) but cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s work is so graceful and fluid that the self-imposed restrictions are transcended. The Whale is a moving, enveloping film that, while it very rarely departs from its stage origins, reaches the heights of emotional drama.