We always carry part of ourselves into the films we watch. Memories, past events, half-forgotten trauma and half-remembered dreams, inform how we perceive art, how it affects us and persists in our mind long after the screen fades to black. When dealing with a work about a universal experience like aging, we can only assume each viewer will see a slightly different picture. The Father I saw isn't The Father you'll see, or even The Father its makers intended to create. Many came out of the film raving about Sir Anthony Hopkins' tour-de-force as an old man suffering from dementia, his reality warped into a nightmare of perpetual disorientation. While I appreciate him a great deal, it's the work of another thespian that most affected me.
Ever since I watched the film weeks ago, I can't stop thinking about Olivia Colman's performance, how I saw myself in her, how I saw my parents in the character she portrays, how she broke my heart…
Losing someone to dementia or Alzheimer's is an experience I wish I wasn't familiar with. From the ages of 13 to 26, I lost all my grandparents and the only person who was relatively lucid by the end was my maternal grandmother. Breast cancer had destroyed her body long before the mind had any chance of catching up. As for the other three, I witnessed up close how some of the people who had raised me, who I love dearly, slowly disappeared, their bodies ever-present while their mind, their memories and identity, floated away on the chilling breeze. Few things will ever wound as much as my paternal grandmother, the woman who had taken care of me when my parents were at work and I was still a kid, didn't know who I was.
The worst part may have been the fact I got angry at myself for those dark feelings. She wasn't to blame. Nobody was to blame. Only time, which stops for no one. Or maybe the worst part was seeing my grandfather and my dad cope with the same horrible reality. The person who meant the world to them suddenly didn't know who they were or else thought they were somebody else, often another individual who had been lost long ago. On those occasions, through clouds of confusion and misunderstanding, my grandmother went through a flash of grief, mourning those she had forgotten were gone. Living through that with a loved one makes you a sentimental illusionist of the highest order.
In the past two years, as I've reckoned with the realities of my mental health, there have been long meditations on how my grandmother's gradual demise helped me hone the skills of deception. As adulthood came about and depression settled in, I had already perfected the art of pretending everything was fine. When talking to my ailing grandmother and later my grandfather, I tried never to let my feelings of sorrow show through, comforting rather than adding more stress to their plight. The same thing applied to my parents. Why burden them with my pain if they were already going through their own tempest of emotion? And so, I perfected masks and learned how to paint a hollow smile. When that didn't work, a plastering of annoyance or irritation usually did the trick. Anything to hide the despondence.
There's a reason for this self-evisceration, this confession of mine to you, dear reader. I want to make it clear why I responded so intensely to Olivia Colman in The Father, to her crystallization of that experience of watching someone slip away inside a crumbling mind. So many choices rang true, so many actorly bits of business smelt of the particular kind of despair that affects those who put on a cheery face while the world burns. It's all in the way she moves around Hopkins, how her expressions and vocal cadences are calibrated for each person in slightly different ways. To her ailing patriarch, she might put on a placating bout of patient cheer, while presenting her husband with a silent plea. When nobody is looking, a more severe expression might blossom, followed by a self-recriminating sigh, a weary deflation as if all the energy had left her body for a merciful breath.
Dealing with this personal hell is to see the domestic space become a stage and Colman plays the performance within the performance. A trip to the doctor is especially great in how it allows us to see her switch modes, asking for understanding while mediating a broken conversation. She might try a strategy of well-paced reasoning with her father while exchanging knowing smiles with the medical professional, asking for their fortitude with a tiny show of artificial camaraderie. But then, a couple of words from the senile pater familias will take her by surprise. We've seen her hurt in so many different ways at this point that it also shocks us how unready she seems for this latest indignity. Still, there's no time for misery, the world must go on and the consultation can't last forever.
One must choose another hollow pleasantry to smooth the conversation, calm the father down, get back to business, put all that hurt in the back of the mind where it will fester. Katharine Hepburn once famously criticized Meryl Streep, saying you could see all the clicks inside her head, the projection of internal thought too overt, too mechanical. The same criticism could be applied to Colman's take on this beleaguered daughter but I'd argue the clicking is a feature, not a bug. So much is confusing about The Father -- we're often trapped inside the titular character's subjectivity -- that one needs an anchor to sustain. Colman's clarity of thought, her emotional transparency, is needed. She's an urgent element of brittle order within the smoky amorphousness of The Father.
Colman's particular brand of externalized internal struggle is as crucial to the picture as Hopkins' star turn. While privileging the father's fractured perception of time, space and identity, the film is built as a juxtaposition of two people experiencing the same dilemma from distinct viewpoints. It's the mingling of these opposing refractions that creates much of the piece's particular mood. It hurts to feel Anthony Hopkins losing himself. It hurts much more to see Olivia Colman be a stoic witness to that horror. It's the same symphony played by two radically different musicians, their incompatible renditions joined to create a most frightening sonorous monster. Deliberate cacophony is the essence of their dynamic.
If you'd allow me one last morsel of autobiographic rambling, the final scenes of Olivia Colman in The Father felt like reliving the last months of my maternal grandfather's life as 2020 reached its end. There are no words eloquent enough to describe how lacerating it can be when a daughter talks to her dad and he regards her as a stranger. Somehow, the actress overcomes the limits of language and delivers a perfect encapsulation of that specific torment, the nightmare I saw play out in my mother's face.
Sometimes, no mask can hide the pain, no wall of stoicism can hold back the tears. All of that is in the way Olivia Colman leaves the picture in a cold haze of guilt holding hands with resolution, a loss so absolute it's hard to comprehend how a single human can withstand it. Seeing your own pain reflected on the screen can be cathartic and for that, I thank Olivia Colman. She shook me to my core, made me cry, and, paradoxically, allowed me to glimpse the light at the end of the tunnel.
The Father is now opening in select US theaters. The film will then be available on VOD starting March 26th.