Almost four decades ago, Anthony Hopkins played a man so overwhelmed by the unconditional love required by parenthood that his feeling twisted into a bitter, obsessive anger. That movie, called The Good Father, put Hopkins’ range of exacting intensity in the spotlight (long before he won the Oscar for his portrayal of serial killer Hannibal Lecter, the perverse father figure to Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling). Now once again, Hopkins plays the role of paterfamilias — minus the ironic descriptor — for another cinematic tour de force.
In The Father, the feature directorial debut from French playwright Florian Zeller, adapted from his 2012 French-language play, Le Pére, and translated into English by Christopher Hampton (Atonement), Hopkins plays Anthony, a fictional namesake who shares the actor’s date of birth — New Year’s Eve 1937. When we’re introduced to Anthony, he’s sitting in a well-appointed London apartment, listening to opera: the portrait of calm and gentility.
Although Anthony is alone, he wears headphones. The music is Henry Purcell’s King Arthur. But it’s another king, Shakespeare’s Lear, that comes to mind when daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) interrupts the reverie to scold her father for chasing off yet another home caregiver.
You see, Anne is desperate to get help for her father. Her plan to escape her father’s sly tyranny — which she describes to the next potential caregiver (Imogen Poots) as “his ways” — by following a new love to Paris depends on it. The lesser favored daughter, Anne is Lear’s Cordelia and Goneril rolled into one.
As intruders played by Mark Gatiss, Rufus Sewell and Olivia Williams turn up in the apartment, swapping roles, it becomes increasingly clear that Anthony’s ability to recognize faces and places is compromised by dementia, and we’re trapped in a terrifying bewilderment with him. Like the mad king in the play, he no longer knows who he is but insists he’s still in charge.
We’ve seen Hopkins execute this perfect pirouette before. With effortless charm, he earns the trust of his keeper only to use it against her the next moment. What was that famous phrase? Quid pro quo, Clarice. But up against the ultimate adversary — mortality — it’s less cruel trick and more survival tactic. This is a performance not to be missed.