The Son review movie

If it wasn’t for Anthony Hopkins’s powerful performance, Florian Zeller’s 2020 directorial debut, The Father, might have come across as entirely gimmicky in its puzzle-box approach to rendering its title character’s dementia on screen. But, then, New York City theatergoers who’ve seen Zeller’s plays know that such narrative game-playing is his stock in trade. Whether it’s dementia in The Father, a midlife crisis in The Mother, or grief after losing a loved one in The Height of the Storm, there doesn’t seem to be a psychological crisis that the French playwright isn’t willing to turn into a foundation for structural cleverness.

That makes Zeller and Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of the former’s 2019 play The Son surprising, even refreshing, in its straightforwardness. In dramatizing the struggles of divorced and often-absent father Peter (Hugh Jackman), his ex-wife Kate (Laura Dern), and Peter’s current girlfriend, Beth (Vanessa Kirby), in dealing with young Nicholas’s (Zen McGrath) clinical depression, Zeller has largely sanded away his usual manipulations of time and space. For once, he seems genuinely interested in exploring his characters’ psychologies.

The film’s title is slightly misleading. The focus is less on Nicholas, the son, than on Peter and his difficulties navigating the situation. Nicholas’s depression has manifested itself not only in suicide attempts, but in frequent lying and deception: among other things, pretending to be at school while actually being truant for months on end. When his father desperately asks him to explain his actions, the best Nicholas can come up with is: “It’s life. It’s weighing me down.”

Zeller doesn’t try to offer any pat explanations for Nicholas’s depression, which is the more honest approach in depicting a mental illness that can be agonizingly mysterious in nature. Instead, he drops hints as to possible root causes. Chief among them is the split between Peter and Kate, which appears to have made him feel ignored, especially since both his parents seem to be trying to make inroads in their own professional careers. Peter, in particular, a rising-star lawyer, is chasing after a plum gig working for a political campaign in D.C., and initially seems to prize that pursuit more than dealing with Nicholas’s emotional troubles. (By contrast, Zeller offers comparably little detail about Kate and Beth’s lives outside of Peter and Nicholas’s orbits.)

The Son, perhaps inevitably, touches on questions about whether being a parent inherently means having to put aside one’s personal ambitions. Zeller also tantalizingly implies the danger of children repeating the sins of their fathers. Anthony Hopkins makes a one-scene cameo in the film as Peter’s own father and offers a concise yet brutal portrait of a cold, hard figure who believes in tough love above all else. “Just fucking get over it” is his response to Peter when his son brings up the problems he saw in the way his father raised him. Some of the most unsettling moments in Jackman’s performance lie in the fear in his eyes when he finds himself acting in ways toward Nicholas that resemble his father’s treatment of him.

Zeller’s refusal in this case to resort to structural trickery allows us to better appreciate his gift for lyrical dialogue and empathy for troubled souls. Which isn’t to say that The Son is entirely free of his more frustrating habits. A recurring, doom-laden image of a washing machine might as well have had “metaphor” plastered on the screen for all the subtlety with which it evokes Nicholas’s emotional free fall. Plus, the fact that a rifle given to Peter by his father is hiding behind the washing machine ends up being a very literal illustration of Chekhov’s gun. Perhaps most hackneyed, though, is a final scene in which Zeller indulges in a fantasy-versus-reality bait-and-switch that’s not only entirely predictable, but arguably sadistic given its tragic context.

Nevertheless, and like it did in The Father, Zeller’s skill with actors goes a very long way in compensating for The Son’s limitations. Though Dern and Kirby wring a lot of pathos out of their slightly underwritten parts, and newcomer McGrath memorably conveys the wide variety of Nicholas’s moods, it’s Jackman who impresses most. A performer known for exuding a certain charm even when he’s playing a character like Wolverine, Jackman digs deep into Peter’s frustration and guilt, unafraid to occasionally challenge audience sympathy toward his well-meaning yet clueless character. All by himself, Jackman imbues The Son with a tragic power that makes even Zeller’s most manipulative excesses easier to tolerate.

Score: 

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, Zen McGrath, Hugh Quarshie, Anthony Hopkins  Director: Florian Zeller  Screenwriter: Christopher Hampton, Florian Zeller  Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics  Running Time: 123 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2022

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