Father Dearest
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Father Dearest A quiet family melodrama—and that’s a compliment. BY JOHN PODHORETZ Once upon a time, there were a dozen movies released every year similar to the English picture When Did You...
...There isn’t much more to the movie than this...
...Blake’s brief of particulars against Arthur starts out rather petty...
...As it is, it is a solid, intelligent, honest, engrossing piece of work...
...Broadbent (whom you may not know by name but you do know by face) is put in the near-impossible position of having to play 15 years younger and 15 years older than he is in different scenes, and he manages it perfectly without much in the way of makeup or bother...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...Beaty’s presence in their lives sours Blake on his father, and when the adolescent Blake begins to express himself romantically, he is seized by the fear that his father will somehow overshadow and replace him...
...chronicles the fi nal three weeks in the life of Arthur Morrison (Jim Broadbent), a rural Englishman whose Londoner son Blake (Colin Firth) is approaching middle age in a state of quiet fi lial rage...
...If When Did You Last See Your Father...
...At fi rst we think Arthur is a petty con man, since Blake’s narration informs us that his father is always looking for an angle, a way around the rules, a freebie, a shortcut...
...If the movie as a whole were the equal of that closing scene, it would rank with the greatest fi lms...
...It comes as a great surprise when it turns out that the scamming line he feeds a parking lot attendant—that he is a doctor— turns out to be the truth...
...Who wants family drama when you can have robots beating each other up on a Los Angeles street...
...The family drama has become a relative rarity in English-language cinema, and there is something more than a little odd about that...
...And then things start to get rather more complicated...
...indeed, it’s so simple that its director, Anand Tucker, does everything he can to add visual variety in the form of inventive fl ashbacks, weird perspectives, and whole scenes shot in mirrors...
...Blake Morrison is a real person, an English poet, and the movie is based on his 1993 memoir...
...He recalls a camping trip during which Arthur insisted they use a newfangled sleeping bag he invented, only to end up fl oating in two feet of water...
...But he is prevented from constructing a rounded character by Andrew Nicholls’s screenplay, which becomes very rote whenever it is about anyone but Arthur...
...ends spectacularly, with a transfi guring sequence that lasts all of two minutes and that no one who sees it will ever forget...
...There’s a theory buried in there somewhere about how the son and the father are changing places—one is a refl ection of the other, and so on—but Tucker is just gussying up the oldest of stories, a story so powerful and elemental that it doesn’t need the fancy camera work to pack a wallop...
...is a crashing bore...
...has an abiding weakness, it is that the Blake we see is barely articulate, much less a celebrated writer with a keen eye...
...After all, the family has been the dominant subject of narrative art since the dawn of the age of the novel in the 18th century, and for the most obvious of reasons: Everyone is part of a family, and so no matter how unfamiliar the setting or elaborate the plot, the characters are grounded in a recognizable reality...
...Getting something for nothing is the great pleasure of his life, Blake says...
...When Blake returns to his boyhood home to await his father’s eventual passing, the movie intertwines the past and present, detailing the causes of Blake’s anger and the ways in which he may have misunderstood his rude, blustery, overwhelming, loving dad...
...How sad that this last sentence almost certainly convinced you that When Did You Last See Your Father...
...When Did You Last See Your Father...
...His mother is noticeably uncomfortable when they are both in the room...
...As he proved earlier this year in the wonderful Then She Found Me, Colin Firth is unparalleled when it comes to displays of unabashed emotional distress...
...The movie works as well as it does because Arthur is a sensationally interesting character, and he is played by a sensationally interesting actor...
...Arthur complains about Blake’s interest in English literature, because he’ll never make a living that way...
...It is for this very reason that the movies gave up on the family drama...
...There’s a woman around whom Arthur insists Blake call Auntie Beaty...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ Once upon a time, there were a dozen movies released every year similar to the English picture When Did You Last See Your Father?—which is nothing more or less than a portrait of ordinary family life and the tensions, traumas, and glories thereof...
...Arthur makes too much noise at a pub...
...When Did You Last See Your Father...
Vol. 13 • June 2008 • No. 39
