When Did You Last See Your Father?
Directed by Anand Tucker
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. The family drama has become a relative rarity in English-language cinema, and there is something more than a little odd about that. 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.
When Did You Last See Your Father? chronicles the final 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 filial rage. 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.
There isn’t much more to the movie than this; indeed, it’s so simple that its director, Anand Tucker, does everything he can to add visual variety in the form of inventive flashbacks, weird perspectives, and whole scenes shot in mirrors. There’s a theory buried in there somewhere about how the son and the father are changing places–one is a reflection 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.
The movie works as well as it does because Arthur is a sensationally interesting character, and he is played by a sensationally interesting actor. 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.
At first 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. Getting something for nothing is the great pleasure of his life, Blake says. 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.
Blake’s brief of particulars against Arthur starts out rather petty. He recalls a camping trip during which Arthur insisted they use a newfangled sleeping bag he invented, only to end up floating in two feet of water. Arthur makes too much noise at a pub. Arthur complains about Blake’s interest in English literature, because he’ll never make a living that way.
And then things start to get rather more complicated. There’s a woman around whom Arthur insists Blake call Auntie Beaty. His mother is noticeably uncomfortable when they are both in the room. 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.
Blake Morrison is a real person, an English poet, and the movie is based on his 1993 memoir. If When Did You Last See Your Father? has an abiding weakness, it is that the Blake we see is barely articulate, much less a celebrated writer with a keen eye. 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. 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. When Did You Last See Your Father? ends spectacularly, with a transfiguring sequence that lasts all of two minutes and that no one who sees it will ever forget. If the movie as a whole were the equal of that closing scene, it would rank with the greatest films. As it is, it is a solid, intelligent, honest, engrossing piece of work. How sad that this last sentence almost certainly convinced you that When Did You Last See Your Father? is a crashing bore. It is for this very reason that the movies gave up on the family drama. Who wants family drama when you can have robots beating each other up on a Los Angeles street?
John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
