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Hopkins, 83, earned best actor for role in ‘The Father’

Reviews by Leonard Heldreth

Our films this month include an account about the onset of dementia, a Chinese film about the loss of a grandmother, a Coen brothers collection of riffs on the Hollywood western, and a WWI version of a mission behind enemy lines.

THE FATHER

Distinguishing between reality and illusion can often be difficult. Someone glimpsed at the edge of your field of vision can be the person you expected or simply someone dressed like that person. A person who approaches during, say, a concert intermission may be someone you know or simply some one who thinks he knows you and wonders why you don’t recognize him (it has happened to me). Even worse is the person you half-recognize but can’t really identify as you desperately look for hints. The Father takes these problems and misinterpretations to new levels of anxiety as it tracks the increasing effects of dementia on an eighty-four-yearold man (Anthony Hopkins) whose world is slowly crumbling around him, leaving him at the end crying out for his long-dead mother.

In the opening scenes Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) seems like a reasonably adjusted senior citizen living in a very comfortable flat in London with his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman). But cracks in his situation appear–he doesn’t recognize the man in the living room who says he is Anne’s husband (Mark Gatiss); he doesn’t remember that one of his daughters, who he says hasn’t been to see him in some time, is actually dead; he tells one caregiver that he was a professional dancer, but Anne says he was an engineer; and he keeps imagining someone has stolen his watch.

To give the audience some insight into Anthony’s confusion, Anne is played in some scenes by Olivia Coleman and in others by Olivia Williams; the husband is sometimes played by Rufus Sewell, and Imogen Poots sometimes plays Laura, a caregiver being interviewed, and sometimes, in flashbacks, plays Lucy, Anthony’s dead daughter. Further, the apartment keeps changing in its layout and its decorations; even small details vary–a bag holding a chicken to be roasted for dinner is blue in one scene and white in another. These switches let the audience share Anthony’s growing confusion as his reality keeps changing.

It’s a disconcerting look at a fate that is becoming more common, as longer life spans force our brains to exceed their optimum function.

Anthony Hopkins gives what many critics see as the best performance of his distinguished career, winning his second Academy Award for best actor at age 83. The Father is directed by writer/ director Florian Zeller, who adapted his prize-winning, 2012 French play of the same name, and with Christopher Hampton won the Oscar for best adapted Screenplay.

Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins in a scene from ‘The Father.’

THE FAREWELL

The Farewell was written and directed by Lulu Wang, a Chinese woman who based the film on an incident from her own life–the impending death of her grandmother. Wang is portrayed in the film by Awkwafina (Crazy Rich Asians), who balances the humor and sadness of her character, and won a Golden Globe for Best Actress.

Billi (Awkwafina), an aspiring writer who has just been turned down for a Guggenheim Fellowship, finds out from her mother that her grandmother Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen) has been diagnosed with lung cancer and has only a few months to live. The family doesn’t want Nai Nai to know she has terminal cancer, and with the doctor’s collaboration, they falsify the records and swear Billi to secrecy. Then the family convinces a cousin who was planning a wedding to move his nuptial plans forward, and they all agree to meet in Changchun to say farewell to Nai Nai without her being aware of the real reason for the family meeting.

Billi objects to keeping her grandmother in the dark about her condition, and Billi’s parents, Haiyan and Jian, want her to stay in New York for fear that she will accidentally reveal the truth. They try to explain to her the cultural differences between how Easterners and Westerners deal with impending death, telling her that Nai Nai concealed her husband’s impending death from him until nearly the end. Billi acquiesces, but as soon as her parents are on their way to China, she books her own fight to Changchun.

All goes as well as possible, and the sadness of the impending death is balanced by humor from minor characters and the often funny confusions that arise in any wedding.

The family successfully conceals that the wedding is also a farewell, and Billi has several talks with Nai Nai and other family members about matters that concern her–the clash between her desire for Western success and her reluctance to give up some of the old ways; the changes she sees happening about her as China modernizes; the family’s collective grief that contrasts with the individual Western grief; and ways she can cope with her transition from traditional Chinese customs and the city she grew up in, to newer ways and the metropolis that now sprawls around her.

These discussions are not isolated sermons or lectures but simply subjects that wind through the conversations and actions.

At the end Billi and her parents fly back to New York, and a card states that the woman on whom Nai Nai was modeled is still alive, six years after her diagnosis. The film, combining humor with the inevitable grief over expected loss, conveys a good picture of the dilemmas facing the Chinese people as they find themselves, ready or not, thrust into the 21st century.

THE BALLAD OF

BUSTER SCRUGGS

Fans of Joel and Ethan Coen will want to watch all six sections of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, even though the title refers only to the first section. The film was originally conceived as a multi-part series for Netflix, with different directors handling different sections, as Italian filmmakers did for collections such as the 1968 Spirits of the Dead. Like most anthologies, however, these collections were frequently uneven, with an audience forced to watch Roger Vadim’s mediocre Metzengerstein to get to Fellini’s Toby Dammit. The Coens decided to toss the multidirector concept, and that smoothed out the quality; then they jammed the six episodes into one 135-minute film, inserted a book at the beginning to imply each minifilm was a chapter, and turned it over to Netflix to release.