{"id":23608,"date":"2021-03-20T12:42:41","date_gmt":"2021-03-20T02:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=23608"},"modified":"2021-04-14T13:23:58","modified_gmt":"2021-04-14T03:23:58","slug":"the-father","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=23608","title":{"rendered":"The Father"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"thefatherposter\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Director:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Florian Zeller
\nWriter:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Christopher Hampton
\nCast:\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Coleman, Olivia Williams<\/p>\n

A<\/span>nne visits her father Anthony, an octogenarian with dementia, in his flat in London.\u00a0 She’s desperate to sort out their affairs after his belligerent behaviour leads to his most recent caretaker quitting in protest.\u00a0 Anthony insists that he was right to act as he did because he is convinced the caretaker was stealing from him.\u00a0 Why even have a caretaker?\u00a0 Anthony assures Anne\u00a0he is still self sufficient.\u00a0 Anne lets him know that she intends to move to Paris with her boyfriend soon and without a caretaker, Anthony will need to be placed in a home.\u00a0 This confuses and alarms Anthony who thought Anne was married to her husband James.\u00a0 She tells him they separated five years ago.<\/p>\n

“If I understand correctly, you\u2019re leaving me, is that it? You\u2019re abandoning me.” sneers Anthony.\u00a0 The implications of their conversation devastates him.<\/p>\n

The Father<\/em> opens with Anthony living what appears to be a pleasant enough existence, listening to opera in his neat, finely appointed apartment.\u00a0 But very quickly, he becomes disoriented by his surroundings.\u00a0 He seems to relive the same conversations over and over.\u00a0 There are huge gaps in his memory he can seemingly not account for.\u00a0\u00a0Who is his caretaker?\u00a0 Where is his watch?\u00a0 Does the apartment belong to him or Anne?<\/p>\n

Not only does Anthony loses his bearings, so do we as the viewer, seeing the world through his eyes.\u00a0 Small details shift rapidly, confusing and confounding us.\u00a0 The kitchen tiles change from one pattern to another.\u00a0 The bag that contains Anthony’s chicken dinner changes colour.\u00a0 Anthony even momentarily confuses his daughter Anne, initially played by Olivia Coleman, with another British actress Olivia Williams.<\/p>\n

By setting the gaze of the film through the eyes of a man with dementia,\u00a0 director Florian Zeller sets a tone akin to a horror film, despite the relatively benign nature of the conversations Anthony has.\u00a0 The film imparts a hugely sympathetic outlook on both dementia suffers and their loved ones, as we can see and understand just how frustrated Anthony would be, struggling to pin down even the most basic details he thought he knew about his life.<\/p>\n

\"thefatherthumb\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Anthony Hopkins delivers an incredible, layered and vulnerable performance in the lead role.\u00a0 He exhibits an air of bravado that hints at the proud kind of\u00a0man he must’ve been before age and illness took hold.\u00a0 Now he struggles to grapple with his surroundings and tries, with utter futility, to exhibit some sense of order and control.\u00a0 At times we see the old Anthony.\u00a0 When Anne introduces a potential new caretaker (played by Imogen Poots), he momentarily rolls back the years and playfully flirts with her, dancing lightly on his feet and offering her an aperitif.\u00a0 But Poots reminds him of his younger daughter and when she speaks in a manner that breaks that illusion, he turns on a dime, and lashes out with cruelty.<\/p>\n

The Father<\/em> is a tightly constructed, carefully honed film, that must’ve been storyboarded and planned to the nth degree.\u00a0 Lines of dialogue repeat multiple times and conversations weave out of chronological order, until we suddenly arrive back to where we started.\u00a0 Production designer Peter Francis does an incredible job with shifting and redesigning the flat over and over throughout the course of the film as it takes on the appearance of Anthony’s current reality or that of his memory.\u00a0 Likewise much credit must go to editor Yorgos Lamrinos who has the unenviable task of putting together a film that is purposefully un-cohesive structurally, but still makes sense narratively, with a crescendo that is moving and heart breaking.<\/p>\n

As an empathetic character study about dementia,\u00a0The Father<\/em> is a beautiful, near perfectly put together production.\u00a0 The supporting cast – Olivia Coleman as Anne, Rufus Sewell as her husband\/ex-husband, and Olivia William as her caretaker – are all wonderful performers and totally convincing in their roles as\u00a0key figures slowly fading from the memory of Anthony’s life.\u00a0 But it’s Anthony Hopkins, at 83, who is the stand out star of this film.\u00a0 His performance is hugely affecting and one that will stay with me for some time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A man refuses all assistance from his daughter as he ages. As he tries to make sense of his changing circumstances, he begins to doubt his loved ones, his own mind and even the fabric of his reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23611,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2686,2963,2961,2962],"class_list":["post-23608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films","tag-anthony-hopkins","tag-imogen-poots","tag-olivia-coleman","tag-olivia-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23608"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23615,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23608\/revisions\/23615"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}