Anthony Hopkins is gunning for that second Best Actor trophy for his brilliant, career-crowning work as Anthony in “The Father.”
Playing a man, suffering from Alzheimer’s, who refuses all assistance from his daughter as his mental state deteriorates, Hopkins and director Florian Zeller create an indelible portrait of identity loss. Not knowing which location he is in from scene to scene, Zeller allows us to be sucked into the head of Anthony. This is a harrowing journey that represents the most realistic depiction of Dementia ever put on screen.
Anthony lives in a posh London flat, always visited by his caretaker daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman). After being told by Anne that she is leaving for Paris, he loses his temper. The next scene he’s back to his jovial self, flirting with a just-hired nurse (Imogen Poots) that he initially responds to well, before treating with utter irrelevance. That’s Anthony, a ticking time-bomb of a person whose unpredictability from scene-to-scene is utterly horrifying to behold.
As he tries to make sense of the changes happening around him, Anthony, much like us, can’t really trust anybody he comes into contact with because they may or may not be figments of his own imagination. We live in his world and thus have to make sense of everything we see. Zeller adapts his 2014 stage play, with co-writer Christopher Hampton, in somewhat stagey fashion, but that doesn’t even matter as this is very much a film about feeling confined in the very limited spaces of Anthony’s psyche.
Zeller only ups the confusion further when the father sees another woman (Olivia Williams) proclaiming to be his daughter and two men (Mark Gatiss and Rufus Sewell) taking turns as her husband, both seemingly, in Anthony’s eyes at least, trying to convince her to put him in a caregiving facility.
Hopkins’ brilliant chops are almost matched by Colman as Anne, who tries to be our guide in the film, even when Anthony’s mind continuously betrays her reliability. And yet, the love they share as father-daughter is undeniable. Colman, an Oscar winner for "The Favourite,” has an abundance of warmth and humor to try to take the viewer away, only for some time, from the eerie darkness of the film’s central head. She desperately wants her father (and us) to see things as they are, a reality that feels all too distanced from the muddled confines of dementia.
As he tries to make sense of the continuous changing circumstances, Anthony begins to doubt his loved ones, his own mind and the fabric of the new world he’s created. Zeller ingeniously finds a way to suck the viewer into the head of a man losing grasp of reality. The patience, frustration, hurt, and unwavering love depicted between Hopinks’ ill character and daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) is the heart and soul of this finely calibrated film.
Score: B+
The short version: "Woman Unknown" was a compromise. The jury deadlocked over "Possible Love" and "NAZA," not able to com to terms, fell back on their #3, May el-Toukhy's film.