“The Father” is a family drama about taking care of a loved one with dementia that manipulates reality to tell the story from two very different points of view, the caretakers and the patient.
Anthony (Sir Anthony Hopkins) is an eighty-year-old former engineer with a luxurious London apartment filled with art and music. What’s missing is a carer, someone to make sure he eats, takes his pills and is comfortable as dementia makes his behavior increasingly unpredictable. By times charming, other times angry, confused and controlling and always convinced someone has stolen his prized wristwatch, he’s scared away a series of caretakers. “I don’t need anyone,” he bellows in denial. His daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) moved in to run the house, but she’s relocating to Paris and needs to find someone to look after her father.
That is the set-up. From here director Florian Zeller, who co-wrote the script with Christopher Hampton, artfully toggles between realities, Anne’s story and the way Anthony sees what’s happening in his beloved apartment. It is a disorienting technique that switches perspectives without warning, creating a knotty drama where nothing is as it seems in a carefully crafted depiction of dementia.
“The Father” is a sensitively made portrait of a failing mind anchored by a towering, emotional performance from Hopkins. The Oscar winner has made a career playing characters etched in ice; cool and collected. Here we see the vulnerable side, the lion in winter slowly losing himself to the vagaries of disease. It’s a tour de force of a performance that is often a difficult watch but his control of the character, particularly in the film’s final heartbreaking moments, as Anthony’s real and illusory lives intersect, is astonishing.
Coleman brings subtlety and warmth to the long-suffering Anne, but it’s Imogene Poots who makes the most of her small but wonderfully written scene. In the course of just a few minutes she falls prey to Anthony’s charm only to feel the bite of his poison tongue, navigating a range of emotions and reactions like a character on the run from an Edward Albee play.
The success of “The Father” isn’t the structurally complex storytelling but the performances that traverse the trickery of the telling to find the humanity of the situation.
Richard joins CP24 to have a look at the weekend’s new movies including Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland in the biopic “Judy,” and the animated Yeti movie “Abominable” and the music doc “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice.”
Richard sits in on the CTV NewsChannel with news anchor Marcia MacMillan to have a look at the weekend’s big releases including Renée Zellweger’s tour de force, soon-to-be-Oscar-nominated portrayal of “The Wizard of Oz” star in the biopic “Judy,” the animated homesick Yeti movie “Abominable” and the music doc “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice.”
Richard has a look at the new movies coming to theatres, including Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland in the biopic “Judy,” and the animated Yeti movie “Abominable” and the music doc “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice” with CFRA morning show host Bill Carroll.
A weekly feature from ctvnews.ca! The Crouse Review is a quick, hot take on the weekend’s biggest and most interesting movies! This week Richard looks at Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland in the biopic “Judy,” and the animated Yeti movie “Abominable” and the music doc “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice.”
Richard sits in on the CJAD Montreal morning show with host Andrew Carter to talk the new movies coming to theatres including Renée Zellweger’s soon-to-be-Oscar-nominated portrayal of Judy Garland in the biopic “Judy,” and the animated homesick Yeti movie “Abominable.”
A powerhouse performer packed into a frail body and even frailer psyche Judy Garland left behind a legacy that is equal parts Hollywood history and cautionary tale. “Judy,” a new film directed by Rupert Goold, examines the declining days of “The Wizard Of Oz” star as she arrives in London to perform a series of concerts.
The year is 1968. Stateside Garland (Renée Zellweger) is at a low ebb. She lives in hotels she can’t afford, is fighting for custody of her children and playing in nightclubs for $150 a show, a fraction of her former superstar salary. She is an unemployable legend. “Unreliable and uninsurable,” she says. “And that’s what the ones who like me say.”
When she’s offered a five-week run at the ritzy Talk of The Town at the Palladium in London, England, she’s reticent. She doesn’t want to be separated from her kids for that long, but she’s broke. She decides to leave her children so that she can make enough money to return and put a roof over their head.
in London she is treated like royalty, packing the club night after night but her insecurities eat at her. “What if I can’t do it again,” she says after her wildly successful opening night. Drink, pills, self-doubt, on-stage meltdowns and a quickie marriage make for an eventful but uneven series of shows. In the press parlance of the time she is often “exhausted and emotional.”
Flashback to young Judy (Darci Shaw) on the MGM backlot set the stage for the tragedy that follows.
“Judy” often veers into sentimentality—the finale clumsily documents the moment when the singer finally got the kind of support she always needed from an audience—but doesn’t shy away from darker aspects of Garland’s life. Bringing the story to vivid life is Zellweger in a career best performance. She looks and sounds enough like Garland to be convincing, but this isn’t just mimicry. The actress digs deep, finding the humour and humanity in a person often regarded as a tragic figure. “I am Judy Garland for an hour a night,” she says. “I want what everybody else wants but I seem to have a harder time getting it.” Zellweger makes us understand how and why Garland spent a lifetime trying to please people who repaid her by always asking for more.
“Judy” is at its strongest when Zellweger is onscreen. Off stage she captures Garland’s complexity; on stage, in numbers like “I’ll Go My Way by Myself” or “The Trolley Song” she is a musical tour de force. The flashbacks, while nicely done, feel like information we already know and don’t add much to the overall movie. We learn just as much about Garland’s psychological unrest from Zellweger nuanced performance as we do from the broadly written flashbacks. This is, after all, a character study, not a history lesson.
“The Father” is a family drama about taking care of a loved one with dementia that manipulates reality to tell the story from two very different points of view, the caretakers and the patient.
