The Father (2020)

Continuing to catch up on recent Oscar nominees. If Nomadland had been as I feared, I'd make a point not to watch this one next, because it promised to be a bit drearier than most of the competition, in a year with only dramas up for Best Picture.

In what might be the present era, elderly Brit Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) feels sure he can take care of himself. He doesn't welcome any assistants hired by his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman). At his most hostile and paranoid, he accuses them of theft and her of looking for an excuse to move him into a nursing home so she can claim his property. I'm a little surprised he doesn't accuse Anne of gaslighting, because he becomes increasingly confused about the apartment, whom to expect there, and what people have and have not told him. Anne also grows in stress, almost to the point of insanity, and her husband (Rufus Sewell) is less patient still.

I've seen other movies about seniors with Alzheimer's or other dementia, but this is the only one I can clearly call a mind screw, hence the "mystery" tag. The audience is not in much better a position than Anthony to judge what's happening, since everything looks equally real to us. The closest prior experience for me is the opening scene of Wrinkles. Here, even when a character appears to correct a misapprehension, they may well contradict it later, yielding more doubt than the middle of A Beautiful Mind. Some dialog by people other than Anthony gets repeated extensively, reflecting a warped sense of time. If this is authentic, then dementia's worse than I thought. I will say that I predicted a few truths, apparently rightly.

The focus is kept dutifully narrow, with scenes pretty much limited to a few home and hospital rooms. There are only 11 actors, 3 of them uncredited and another 3 with unnamed characters. This smallness makes sense for an adaptation from a play. I'll note that the original was in French and had more spoken lines; what we get here is still pretty wordy but relies more on visual cues.

In keeping with the hero's name, playwright-director Florian Zeller totally had Hopkins in mind for the role and would have gone with a French cast if he couldn't get Hopkins. I won't insist it's Hopkins' most skilled performance since The Silence of the Lambs, but I can see why he became the oldest Best Actor winner, despite his assumption of a posthumous clinch for Chadwick Boseman. Colman's no slouch either, earning her Best Supporting Actress nod.

The final scene is the most emotionally powerful to most viewers -- certainly to the live crew. I'd be more inclined to agree if the cinematography didn't get awkward to hide the emotions of Olivia Williams, who plays multiple roles to Anthony's perception.

Regardless, I do like TF in its melancholy splendor. It doesn't scare me the same way a summary of Still Alice does. If I start to get like Anthony, I hope I might remember movies such as this.