Sir Anthony Hopkins rivets as a man slipping into the fog of dementia in The Father. Read our full review from Sundance:
, which is a bit sweeter in its portraiture but still kind of awful to watch. And now there’s, which premiered here at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday. It’s a mix of the gnarly and the graceful, all anchored by what’s likely to be one of the standout performances of this year.Anthony Hopkins—maybe as venerable a British thespian as there is. Now in his 80s, Hopkins is enjoying a career resurgence sparked by his mysteriously menacing turn on HBO’s.
It’s of course an immense help that everything surrounding him is so vividly, smartly realized as well. The film is directed by first-timer, a lauded French playwright who here adapts his own smash-hit, internationally produced play. It’s an auspicious debut;is expertly tailored, gliding around morosely as Hopkins’s Anthony slips further into his fog. Zeller keeps his film as intimate as a stage play, but makes good use of cinema’s visual advantages.
Zeller at least allows us in the audience to piece together some kind of vague timeline of real events, but linear structure is largely eschewed. This is a nervy approximation of what dementia may actually feel like, the mundane suddenly shifting into the unknown. It’s a much more interesting approach to the subject matter than something straightforward would have been, allowing for the scary stuff to exist in startling concert with the sad.
Throughout all this distortion, Hopkins traverses a vast range. He goes from sweetly doddering to hectoring, charming to frightened, obstinate and then, sometimes, resigned to the limits of his failing perception. Hopkins sharply depicts the moments when Anthony realizes he doesn’t know who someone is or what exactly is happening, but doesn’t want to let on that he’s at sea.
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