The Father: Anthony Hopkins’s ‘staggeringly fine performance’ of a man succumbing to dementia

Anthony Hopkins gives a ‘staggeringly fine performance’ of a man gradually losing his sanity in The Father.

Anthony Hopkins in The Father. Picture: Sean Gleason.

The Father (M)
Released on April 1, 2021
★★★★

The Father, the first film directed by Florian Zeller, is a screen adaptation of Zeller’s own play which, as Le Pere, was a success in Paris in 2012 before being transferred in 2014 to London’s West End, where it also was highly praised. (The Guardian described Zeller as “the most exciting playwright of our time”.) In transferring the material from stage to screen, Zeller has succeeded wonderfully well thanks in no small part to the staggeringly fine leading performance by Anthony Hopkins.

The theme probably sounds a bit grim. Hopkins plays an elderly man called Anthony who is struggling with dementia. The opening scene is set in a well-appointed London apartment with the walls lined with shelves filled with books, and with comfortable chairs and lounges, a fireplace and all the comforts an old man might require. Then Ann (Olivia Colman), Anthony’s daughter, arrives and she drops a bombshell. She tells her father that she has met a man and that she plans to move with him to Paris. She promises she will find a carer for him. Not surprisingly, Anthony is shocked and troubled by this disruption to his comfortable routine. He asks Ann about her husband, but she looks back at him in surprise. Does she even have a husband? A little while later, Ann denies that she ever mentioned leaving for Paris.

At this point it becomes clear that the story is being told entirely from Anthony’s confused perspective; reality and normalcy are gradually drifting away from him. Suddenly there’s a man (Mark Gatiss) in the apartment who says he is Ann’s husband; the apartment belongs to him, he says, and Anthony is staying only temporarily as a guest. Ann reappears, but now she’s played by a different actress (Olivia Williams); she has purchased a chicken and plans to cook it for dinner. Later the husband, who has left, also reappears but now he looks different (he’s played by Rufus Sewell).

Ann introduces Anthony to his new carer, Laura (Imogen Poots), who is young and attractive and who reminds Anthony of his daughter Lucy; the old man flirts with her a little and even demonstrates his tap-dancing skills, but is Laura real? And where is Lucy?

With considerable subtlety, Zeller hints at Anthony’s deteriorating condition in visual ways. Small, almost unnoticeable, changes take place in the apartment; paintings are removed, furniture is moved. It seems like a formidable dramatic challenge to attempt to get inside the mind of a man who is gradually losing his sanity, but that’s what Zeller attempts and successfully achieves.

Anthony is confused but Zeller’s achievement is that for the viewer it’s always pretty clear what’s happening. Anthony’s memories are muddled, he confuses one person with another. Who is this? Is this someone I’ve known all my life? Hopkins is quite outstanding and, needless to say, the film is worth seeing for him alone. But it’s also a very inventive and accomplished debut for Zeller: an awesomely difficult subject beautifully, movingly brought to the cinema screen.

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Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan (MA15+)
Limited release
★★★★

Never having been a fan of punk, I started watching Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan, a biography of the lead singer of the Pogues, without much enthusiasm but I was very quickly won over both by the personality of the film’s subject and by the sheer invention and accomplishment of director Julien Temple. This isn’t the first time that Temple — best known for the musical feature Absolute Beginners (1986) — has made an impressive film about punk; back in 1979 The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle was a persuasive portrait of Johnny Rotten.

MacGowan is now 62, but he looks 25 years older. A lifetime of alcohol and substance abuse has taken its toll. Confined to a wheelchair and with his head permanently tilted to one side, he speaks in tones so slurred that subtitles are used to “translate” him. It seems he refused to give a formal interview to Temple; instead he’s seen in conversation with two of his friends and supporters, former Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and actor Johnny Depp, and with his wife, Victoria.

Temple is adept at taking some fairly basic material and fleshing it out by a variety of means to tell a fully rounded narrative about the life and times of an entertainer who saw himself both as a “poet and piss artist” and as a saviour of Irish music (at his 60th birthday party he is presented with a lifetime achievement award by Irish President Michael Higgins).

MacGowan grew up on a farm in Tipperary hearing stories of “the Great Hunger” and the Black and Tan Wars. He was drinking stout and whisky and smoking at the age of six, and he was a confirmed supporter of the IRA from about the same time. (“The war of independence started in 1919 just outside our gate,” he proclaims.) But the family moved to England where, in the late 1950s, there were still warnings posted outside rooming houses that “No Irish Need Apply”. His father, Matthew, had a decent job and wanted to be accepted into the middle class but, as MacGowan says, “If you were Irish you couldn’t become middle class”. In 1972, at about the time of the infamous massacre known as Bloody Sunday, MacGowan won a scholarship to Westminster, one of Britain’s most prestigious schools, but he soon was expelled.

Then he discovered the Sex Pistols (“The best thing that ever happened to me”) and became involved in a couple of punk bands before the Pogues (the original name, Pogue Mahone, we are informed, means “Kiss my ass” in Gaelic).

Temple uses a variety of methods to illustrate MacGowan’s journey. There are the aforementioned “conversations” and there are also MacGowan’s often revealing comments (WB Yeats was “an Irishman but not a Paddy”; James Joyce was “a terrible piss artist”). Of all the Irish writers with whom MacGowan identifies it is Brendan Behan who impressed him most — both were alcoholics. Also in the mix are animated sequences, excerpts from numerous (unidentified) feature films — among them Joseph Strick’s 1967 version of Ulysses — and contemporary footage of concerts, TV interviews and home movies, as well as re-enacted scenes of life on the farm. All this material comes together to provide a vibrant portrait of the singer-poet whose biggest hit (Fairytale of New York) he despises.

Punk fans will need no further recommendation but probably anyone interested in the relationship between Ireland and the British across the past 100 or so years also would find Crock of Gold fascinating. In Temple’s hands it’s more than a rock musical; it’s a portrait of a flawed, confronting artist and ardent Irish patriot.