While Sundance has had a mixed track record in recent years as a platform to launch an Oscar contender, I have almost no doubt in my mind that Anthony Hopkins will receive a Best Actor nomination for his performance as the eponymous father Anthony in playwright Florian Zeller's directorial debut The Father, which played in the Premieres section at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. It's a rarity for an actor as esteemed as Hopkins to get another career-defining performance this late, but there's no other way to describe it other than a tour-de-force and perhaps his greatest role to date.
Adapting from his own play Le Père, Zeller tells the story of Anthony (Hopkins), an elderly man who recently moved in with his daughter Anne (Oscar winner and overall lovely human Olivia Colman). For much of the beginning of the movie, it seems like a pretty standard drama about a man facing a deteriorating mental state as he deals with dementia — similar to Michael Haneke's Amour, a film I adore. He's forgetful and sometimes paranoid, particularly about his watch, which he believes his caretaker stole.
However, as the movie unfolds, it becomes clear that we're watching it from Anthony's perspective. It starts out slow at first, small changes in the environment, forgotten names or events. At one point his daughter tells him she's moving to Paris to be with her new husband. The next, she's still married to the man she's always been with (Mark Gatiss). In the next, that man changes to a completely different person (Rufus Sewell).
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Zeller begins to play with the viewer in other ways. More than any movie about dementia I've seen in the past, it truly gives you the feeling of what it feels like to be in and out of lucidity. Suffering from dementia should feel like a horror movie and that's what The Father achieves. Surprisingly, it's the moments of clarity — if there ever truly is one — that are the most horrific. You're never sure what reality actually is.
Hopkins' is an emotional powerhouse whose empathetic performance is impossible to not completely give in to. While the movie, to its fault, sometimes feels a little too much like a play adapted to the screen, it feels like an honor to be front row to such a raw and emotive performance. Not once does it ring false. Brilliantly, you can see the man that Anthony once was beneath the confusion.
It's difficult to make a movie about this subject matter move with so much rhythm. However, once The Father has you, it's hard to fall out of its momentum. It may feel stagey at times, as movies based on plays often feel, but it almost works for the effect that Zeller is going for. The devastating final act is when you finally crash to reality and Anthony Hopkins delivers some of the greatest work I think I've seen on screen. It may be early, but one of your Oscar frontrunners is here.
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Hey! I'm Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I'm also a Tomatometer-approved critic.
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