Most stories view disability from an abled perspective, and by extension, sick characters from a healthy perspective. A senile old parent in a film then looks like the abnormality, a misfit behaving insanely, because sanity is the default palette. The environment is inherently designed to accommodate versions of ordinary people, and the atypical parent simply disrupts it.

But The Father is a special film in how it inverts this gaze, choosing instead to view healthy characters and a standard environment from a sickly perspective. This is reflected in the way the narrative opens with a perfectly normal middle-aged woman walking down the street towards what we presume is her father’s apartment, before the baton of gaze is passed onto the ailing old man once the camera is indoors. It soon shows us what this waning man sees – a distorted loop of identity, time, and memory – and in turn achieves the rare distinction of unpacking the inner machinations of dementia without patronizing the people that suffer from it.    

So a heartbreaking scene of an old man asking inane questions about someone else’s wristwatch inherits the burden of context here. This moment becomes a culmination of prior impulses, thus ‘rationalising’ a reaction that might have appeared isolated and idiosyncratic in another film. This film previously establishes that the paranoid man keeps misplacing his watch, often convinced it is stolen. By the time he sees a similar watch on his son-in-law’s hand, we understand why he is incessantly inquiring about it – it is the younger man who by now looks like the imposter in the setting. Ditto for the old man’s daughter, whose physical identity changes between scenes, baffling the viewer and therefore justifying her father’s perplexed face. He cannot seem to comprehend the rhythms of reality, but in the world of the film, he is presented as a regular man responding to the inaccuracies of his surroundings. In his head, he is the protagonist of a perverse psychological thriller, where the people around him seem to be messing with him. Think Jodie Foster in Flightplan, as a grieving lady who suspects that her co-passengers are conspiring to frame her as an unhinged mother. The only difference being: Foster was right, and the old man in The Father is not. 

At the nuclear core of Florian Zeller’s delicately staged chamber drama is 83-year-old actor Anthony Hopkins. In a profound ode to his own decades-long career, Hopkins plays an octogenarian named Anthony, for whom being normal becomes a tiresome performance. Anthony finds it increasingly hard to accept that he is battling the onset of mortality. Dementia is merely the label, death is the terminal disease. He lives alone in a large London flat, and his daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman), visits him after his belligerence has driven away yet another caretaker. Anthony looks like someone who believes that needing help is a weakness. As a result, everything he says and does reveals a fading mind pretending to be functional. Every action of his is rooted in a mix of denial and desire: denial of his diminishment and the desire to dominate his destiny. 

For instance, an early scene opens with him making a cup of tea in the kitchen. It is the kind of routine cemented by years of muscle memory. Yet, an immaculately dressed Anthony is visibly struggling with the sequence (stove, cup, sugar) this morning. He simultaneously refuses to acknowledge this struggle, and so strolls around the kitchen with the coolly rehearsed air of a guilty man acting innocent – whistling to music, twinkle-toeing in an imaginary ballroom, simulating a sense of comfort with his surroundings. At one point, he notices some groceries on the table, momentarily pausing to wonder how they appeared there. One can almost hear him thinking: “Wait, did I go shopping? Am I even capable? Oh of course I went shopping, who the hell else will?”. He proceeds to confidently transfer the ingredients of the bag to the cabinet. Suddenly, he loses his measure of space, left at odds with an empty bag in his hand, as though his cerebral cognizance were reset to factory settings. Again, Anthony’s first instinct is to camouflage this disoriented state, which he does by casually crumpling the plastic and sliding it into his jacket pocket. Nobody is watching, but the heist – of intellectual agency – is complete. 

Anthony Hopkins in The Father

Seldom has a scene so mute and mundane defined the entire personality of a protagonist. A single body evokes the relentless tussle between the ego of a father and the fragility of a man. The scene in the kitchen extends its tone to the rest of the film, where the old man is perpetually torn between believing and being, trusting and reeling. Anthony is too ashamed to admit that his head is not replicating the fluidity of his limbs. Consequently, he spends so much energy putting on a façade of self-assurance – which occasionally morphs into cagey arrogance – that he is left exhausted after interacting, and verbally jousting, with concerned family members. But his sense of time is warped; what he remembers meshes into his experience of how he lives, as a result of which the viewer takes an unticketed tour through the remains of his crumbling mental empire. When Anne leaves, he quietly watches her from his window, and only once she turns a corner on the street below does he sink into his bed for a breather, tired of dressing his descent in the robes of a dizzying summit. 

What perhaps makes Hopkins’ turn truly transcendent – both in terms of a distinguished career as well as the competition in the lead acting category this year – is that, at one level, the fractured consciousness of the reel Anthony is attempting to resemble the mental agility of the real Anthony. He makes it seem as though a character is aspiring to become a person, rather than the other way around. The result is extraordinary and unsettling.

At another level, Hopkins’ control over the art of losing control is rooted in a lived-in reading of the vagaries of age.

His sense of craft has long been supreme, but it is now inextricably personal – marrying the subliminal to the physical – and linked to the twilight of his own life. Both his recent Oscar-nominated parts – an outgoing Pope Benedict XVI in The Two Popes, and an ailing Londoner in The Father – radiate an innate acknowledgment of mortality that stays at odds with his characters’ defiance of decline. 

The Father premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, an edition whose most popular documentary was also centered on a dementia-afflicted father. In Kirsten Johnson’s morbidly profound Dick Johnson Is Dead, the filmmaker gets her old man to “die” in several gory accidents. She repeatedly stages his demise, not only to prepare for the inevitable herself but also to lend her retired-psychiatrist dad the dignity of a physical death rather than a psychological one. The man even gamely participates in his own fake funeral. 

In many ways, Hopkins is both Kirsten and Dick Johnson. The veteran actor, too, seems to be confronting a manner of end through his films; the medium is incidental. The only difference is that Hopkins – the artistic equivalent of a shape-changing therapist – seems to be unafraid of an intellectual death. After gracing the stage in his life, he is now staging the indignity of leaving. His Anthony in The Father is both a rehearsal and a reckoning. The duality extends beyond the promise of awards and trophies. An adoring daughter cannot bear to watch him forget how to remember in a film. An adoring audience cannot help but watch him remember to forget on screen. He’s losing all his leaves, but it’s our tree that feels bare. 

Oscars 2021 will air in India on 26 April.



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