The Son is a maudlin, overwrought family melodrama

There were high expectations for Hugh Jackman’s new movie and while he’s very good, the film really isn’t.

The Son is in cinemas now. Picture: Transmission

There was every reason to have high expectations of The Son.

When Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern and Vanessa Kirby signed up, they probably thought they were going to be part of something near transcendence.

French director Florian Zeller and veteran screenwriter British Christopher Hampton had already done this once before – collaborated on a film adapted from one of Zeller’s stage productions – and it was profoundly moving.

That movie was The Father. It was a perfectly pitched and smart tragicomedy about the psychological bewilderment of dementia, and it earnt Anthony Hopkins a surprising-but-shouldn’t-be-surprising Oscar.

The Son is not going to win anyone an Oscar. A badly misjudged melodrama, this domestic tale is bogged down in heavy handed histrionics and sentimental notes that makes you want to run away.

It overplays almost every hand, as if Zeller and Hampton always picked the 100-piece orchestra when a quartet would have been more effective. Even Hans Zimmer’s score is too imposing, married to scenes that are already unnecessarily maudlin.

Hugh Jackman in The Son. Picture: Transmission

Adapted from Zeller’s 2018 play, The Son (which is neither sequel nor prequel to The Father, more like a thematic cousin), the film stars Jackman as Peter, a well-to-do New Yorker with a demanding job.

His professional commitments take him away from his second wife Beth (Kirby) and their newborn son.

His ex-wife Kate (Dern) shows up on his doorstep and tells Peter their teenage son Nicholas (Zach McGrath) has secretly skipped school for more than a month and she is struggling with single parenting. Nicholas tells his father he wants to live with him, and Peter agrees, even enrolling him in a different school nearby.

The boy is clearly depressed and going through something he can’t fathom, some of which stem from the way Peter left Kate for Beth, a devastating process that Nicholas is still trying to process.

Nicholas’ problems become embedded in Peter’s life, stirring in him, Kate and Beth, questions on parenting and what we owe to our children, and what we inherit from our parents.

The Son is acting in good faith, and the intention is noble – the intersection of cautionary tales in parenting as well as youth mental health. You can’t fault what it’s trying to do, but maybe it’s that enthusiasm which has led the filmmakers astray into mawkish territory.

The Son is overwrought and maudlin. Picture: Transmission

Not content with letting the father-son dynamic play out in as it unfolds, the film also makes hefty use of flashbacks to a family holiday taken by Peter, Kate and Nicholas when the boy was seven.

The scenes are spliced in during the film’s most overwrought moments, interludes of Peter teaching Nicholas to swim as if to remind the audience that there was a time when the relationship wasn’t so fraught – which was already obvious without the repetition.

A short scene between Jackman and Anthony Hopkins as Peter’s callous father only adds to the film’s cloying tone.

There are good performances here. Jackman and Dern are more nuanced than the film itself, both displaying a layered understanding of their characters not evident in the general tone. But Kirby isn’t given much to do, and Hopkins feels like stunt casting.

Perhaps it’s because The Father was such indelible storytelling it catapulted the expectations from the same filmmaking team, which also includes cinematographer Ben Smithard and editor Yorgos Lamprinos, to near-impossible highs.

The Son falls well short.

Rating: 2/5

The Son is in cinemas now

Originally published as The Son is a maudlin, overwrought family melodrama