Film: “The Father” (2020) starring Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman
Dementia doesn’t discriminate. It can strike anyone from your parent, to your elderly high-school science teacher, to someone decades younger than you.
But what actually goes through the minds of someone with dementia? Several years back, Florian Zeller wrote a play about it: “The Father,” which we saw on Broadway. In 2019, he wrote and directed the film version starring Anthony Hopkins. Happily, it hasn’t lost one bit in translation.
Antony (Hopkins’s character) is an 80-year-old retired engineer living in London. His mental state has deteriorated so greatly that his daughter Ann (Olivia Colman) has taken him into her flat to care for him.
However Antony doesn’t really get that he’s lost it. Which is why he doesn’t understand the reason his daughter is suddenly hiring home health aides. The genius of this film that it allows us to see, through Antony’s eyes, his confused view of the world—when for example he mistakes an aide for a daughter he hasn’t seen in years, or when he can’t recognize Ann, or when he misremembers something he heard only minutes earlier. It’s equally upsetting for us to see this unfold.
Hopkins won a Best Actor Oscar for “The Father.” The beauty of his moving performance is that it doesn’t seem like a performance at all. Just an accurate, wonderfully written exposition
of the truth.