What's the best movie of 2021?
It was a favourite of The Guardian which wrote: "The Father has something of Michael Haneke’s Amour in its one-apartment setting, and also something of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1985 stage-play Woman in Mind, in which the heroine retreats from reality. Its effects are essentially theatrical – but they are powerfully achieved, and the performances from Hopkins and Colman are superb. It is a film about grief and what it means to grieve for someone who is still alive."
"This is what makes The Father so brilliant – the film seamlessly blends genuine fear with overwhelming sadness," adds FilmCompanion. "In places, Anthony’s disorientation, which is also ours, seems straight out of a horror film. In one scene, he hears the voice of his second daughter Lucy and walks out of his bedroom but the apartment transforms into a nursing home. We also see flashes of viciousness in his behaviour, especially with his caregivers. Early in the film, we are told that the third one recently left – among other things, he called her a bitch. There are moments in which a hint of Hannibal Lecter seems to flutter over his expressions."
Why The Father is the best film of 2021
"Without resorting to exploitative, amped-up mystery or obfuscation, Zeller and co-writer Christopher Hampton — adapting the former's play to resourceful, Oscar-winning effect, with a subtly cinematic eye — have fashioned a sort of gaslight thriller in which the mind is both predator and prey, as it keeps short-cutting and short-circuiting, going directly to jail without passing go," says Film of the Week.
"There's no unreliable narrator here, since no one is being misled: Anthony's reality, with all its unchosen confusions, is fully and authentically his. Hopkins, earning every gold-plated inch of his second Oscar, inhabits it with gut-punching empathy and conviction, making us alive to every moment until, in another devastating reversal of perspective, we stand outside him once more. It's not fair to recommend The Father without a certain kind of trigger warning: if dementia has been a part of your life, Zeller's film will cut as close as you think it will. But not cruelly so, for once the sobs subside, there is a strange kind of comfort to be found in its understanding."
Tell me more about The Father
The Father is a 2020 psychological drama film co-written and directed by Florian Zeller, in his directorial debut; he co-wrote it with fellow playwright Christopher Hampton based on Zeller's 2012 play Le Père. A French-British co-production, the film stars Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Mark Gatiss, Imogen Poots, Rufus Sewell, and Olivia Williams, and follows an aging man who must deal with his progressing dementia. It is the second adaptation of the play after the 2015 film Floride.
The Father had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on 27 January 2020, and was released in the United States on 26 February 2021, in France on 26 May 2021 by UGC Distribution and in the United Kingdom on 11 June 2021 by Lionsgate UK. It grossed $28 million on a $6 million budget and was acclaimed by critics, who lauded the performances of Hopkins and Colman, as well as the production values and its portrayal of dementia.
At the 93rd Academy Awards, Hopkins won Best Actor and Zeller and Hampton won Best Adapted Screenplay; the film received six nominations in total, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress (Colman).[5] At the 78th Golden Globe Awards, the film received four nominations, including Best Motion Picture – Drama, and it received six nominations at the 74th British Academy Film Awards, winning Best Actor (Hopkins) and Best Adapted Screenplay. In addition, Hopkins and Colman were nominated for Outstanding Leading Actor and Outstanding Supporting Actress respectively at the 27th Screen Actors Guild Awards. [Source: Wikipedia]Writing for The New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis said The Father is "stupendously effective and profoundly upsetting" and described it as a "majestic depiction of things falling away". The Guardian's Anne Billson ranked Hopkins's performance in the film as the best of his career.
Writing for Variety, Owen Gleiberman said "The Father does something that few movies about mental deterioration in old age have brought off in quite this way, or this fully. It places us in the mind of someone losing his mind—and it does so by revealing that mind to be a place of seemingly rational and coherent experience."
For The Guardian, Benjamin Lee wrote of Hopkins's performance: "It's astounding, heartbreaking work, watching him try to rationally explain to himself and those around him what he's experiencing. In some of the film's most quietly upsetting moments, his world has shifted yet again but he remains silent, knowing that any attempt to question what he's woken up to will only fall on deaf ears. Hopkins runs the full gamut of emotions from fury to outrage to longing for his mother like a little child and never once does it feel like a constructed character bit, despite our association with him as an actor with a storied career."
Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote: "The best film about the wages of aging since Amour eight years ago, The Father takes a bracingly insightful, subtle and nuanced look at encroaching dementia and the toll it takes on those in close proximity to the afflicted. Fronted by a stupendous performance from Anthony Hopkins as a proud [man] in denial of his condition, this penetrating work marks an outstanding directorial debut by the play's French author Florian Zeller." Writing for Indiewire, David Ehrlich said: "Zeller adapts his award-winning play of the same name with steely vision and remarkable confidence, as the writer-director makes use of the camera like he's been standing behind one for his entire life. ... In Zeller's hands, what appears to be a conventional-seeming portrait of an unmoored old man as he rages against his daughter and caretaker slowly reveals itself to be the brilliant study of a mind at sea, and of the indescribable pain of watching someone drown."
More great films from 2021
The best movies of 2021: what makes The Father stand out over all the rest?
"What is deeply scary about The Father is that, without obvious first-person camera tricks, it puts us inside Anthony’s head. We see and don’t see what he sees and doesn’t see. We are cleverly invited to assume that certain passages of dialogue are happening in reality – and then shown that they aren’t. We experience with Anthony, step by step, what appears to be the incremental deterioration in his condition, the disorientating time slips and time loops. People morph into other people; situations get elided; the apartment’s furniture seems suddenly and bewilderingly to change; a scene which had appeared to follow the previous one sequentially turns out to have preceded it, or to be Anthony’s delusion or his memory of something else. And new people, people he doesn’t recognise (played by Mark Gatiss and Olivia Williams) keep appearing in his apartment and responding to him with that same sweet smile of patience when he asks what they are doing there. The universe is gaslighting Anthony with these people." [Source: Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian]
"Uniquely, this is told mostly from Anthony’s point of view as we’re taken into his bewildering, distressing world. We experience his confusion as if it were our own. Cut to the next scene and the kitchen in the flat is different, or chairs from the doctor’s office are stacked in the hall. What’s going on here?, he is asking himself, and we are asking the same. Is this even his flat, as he seems to believe, or has he moved in with Anne and her partner, Paul (Rufus Sewell)? He is starting to fail to recognise people. Why is Anne no longer Anne and now being played by Olivia Williams and why is Paul now being played by Mark Gatiss? He must negotiate one illogical situation after another as if trapped in a puzzle that can never be solved. We lose our grip on reality with him and comprehend his suffering — most painfully, a once-controlling man is no longer in control — as well as Anne’s. She is deeply attached to her father, even if her younger sister was his favourite, and even if he was probably never a particularly nice man. Anne sometimes fantasises about putting a pillow over Anthony’s head but when, at one stage, she helps him put his sweater on, that scene is so suffused with compassion and love it will undo you." [Source: The Spectator]
"Florian Zeller is something of a sensation in the theatre world, where starry productions of his plays The Mother, The Truth, and The Height of the Storm have been scooping up awards for more than a decade. With this film version of The Father – a play previously adapted for the big screen in France as Floride (2015) with Jean Rochefort – Zeller has added the Oscar for best adapted screenplay to his tally. Working with Dangerous Liasons screenwriter Christopher Hampton and the brilliant production designer Peter Francis, he has crafted a very moving dementia drama, albeit one that can’t wholly escape its theatrical origins. Much of the project’s power is derived from Anthony Hopkins’s Oscar-winning central performance. Where previous successful attempts to bring Alzheimer’s to the screen have, like Away from Her, centred on the carer’s experience, The Father distorts and disorients in keeping with its protagonist’s increasingly confused view of the world." [Source: Financial Times]
"The play upon which this film is based was described by The Times as “one of the great theatrical experiences of the decade”. This extraordinary adaptation, by turns beguiling, disturbing and profoundly upsetting, is one of the great cinematic experiences of the decade. And by “cinematic” I mean that the director Florian Zeller, adapting his work, has deployed almost every formal weapon in the film-maker’s arsenal — from horror lighting to elliptical edits to asynchronous sound to clever casting twists — to create a visceral viewing experience that is as thrilling as anything in Tenet, John Wick or a million Marvel movies. Only it’s also crushingly sad." [Source: The Times]
