It is an extremely rare event to see a major cinematic offering that deals with the decidedly less than crowd-pleasing subject matter of dementia. It is perhaps a consequence of the pandemic, that has upset the cinema world’s schedule, as it has so much else, that two such films come to the screen almost simultaneously. Supernova and The Father both have central characters who are afflicted with dementia, and the devastating impact of this ailment on their world and that of the people around them.
In Harry McQueen’s Supernova, Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci play Sam and Tusker, a middle-aged couple touring the verdant and oh-so scenic northern districts of England in their battered campervan. The film is essentially a two-hander, and at first glance appears to be a road movie, traversing much of the same territory (literally) as The Trip with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. In this respect, the cinematography by Nick Pope is superb and a real feature of the film. However.it soon becomes clear that McQueen’s film, and Sam and Tusker’s journey, has a quite different and much more serious intent. Tusker has been diagnosed with a degenerative version of early on-set dementia, and hence the trip is actually a “farewell” sojourn to re-connect with family and friends before Tucker’s deterioration, is too severe. And what were his prodigious mental powers are apparently in precipitous decline. (He is a celebrated novelist, whilst Sam is a concert pianist of repute.) I say “apparently” because we learn of the dire nature of Tucker’s condition largely from his own commentary and that of Sam and other characters. There are a few episodes that are suggestive of Tucker’s decline, such as one where he wanders off while the pair are parked at a roadside convenience store, and one particularly telling scene where he is unable to read aloud a prepared speech for Sam’s birthday, and has to hand off the task to Sam himself. But for the most part Tusker seems perfectly lucid, never more so than when he offers avuncular advice to Sam’s young niece Charlotte (Nina Marlin). Ironically, this scene coincides with Sam’s pivotal discovery of Tusker’s clandestine plan to take matters into his own hands and spare Sam the burden of witnessing his inevitable decline.
Tucci and Firth are old friends off-camera (apparently each of them read for both parts). Their easy rapport and interaction, and the sheer quality of their nuanced performances, is the film’s chief saving grace and the main reason for seeing the film. Their performances are the crucial glue binding the film because McQueen’s script seems slightly underdeveloped and often teeters on the cusp of maudlin. It is perhaps not helped that the film’s cast, especially Tucci, has a well-developed screen persona, not least as an in-demand talk show guest where he is a witty and erudite presence. McQueen’s script has flashes of this type of humour, such as the early scene where the two principals light-heartedly bicker over driving directions, and a later scene where, on an overnight stay in Sam’s family home, the two are forced to share the bed that Sam slept in as an adolescent. But these scenes are all too rare; a few more would have leavened the film’s emotional impact and provided even sharper relief for the reality of Tusker’s plight, and the extreme solution that he has planned.
But there is one other noteworthy aspect of the film. Sam and Tusker are obviously a long-term same sex couple, but whereas another film would have emphasised the political implications of this, it goes largely unremarked in McQueen’s screenplay, which has larger concerns to deal with. Ultimately, Tucker’s journey is the one that we must all take, in one way or another. Which might just be the most profound political statement of all. Nonetheless, the lasting impression left by Supernova is of an end result that is considerably less than the sum of its parts, as impressive as some of those parts are.
The Father, though it ostensibly deals with similar subject matter as Supernova, is an altogether different beast. Conventional wisdom says that Anthony Hopkins won his first Best Actor Oscar thirty years ago as Hannibal Lector in Jonathan Demme’s iconic horror/thriller drama, The Silence of the Lambs. As Lector, Hopkins embodied the calculating psychopath like few other characters in cinema history, and the character’s embedding in popular culture bears eloquent testimony to this. But Hopkins’ actual performance as Lector was showy and left large teeth marks in the scenery (though perhaps appropriate given the proclivities of the character). Lector was a tour de force by Hopkins but was never remotely believable.
Whereas in his eponymous role in The Father by writer/director Florian Keller, Hopkins is only too believable, as a retired engineer struggling with the ravages of dementia. Unlike Supernova, Keller puts the audience in the shoes of the main character, so that we experience the world of the film through the fractured, distorted lens of his disordered consciousness. Anthony (Hopkins) is (or perhaps was) a fiercely independent, voluble, and somewhat cantankerous father, struggling to piece together the random fragments of his memory into a coherent whole. We as an audience view an increasingly confusing and hostile world through Anthony’s eyes, and hence relate to his paranoia, impatience and growing sense of isolation and impotence, which manifests itself in the details. Hence, we witness Anthony’s seeming obsession with the location of his watch, and his paranoid belief that others have stolen it; after all, the watch represents Anthony’s desperate attempt to assert some measure of control and connection to a reality that seems ever more ephemeral and tenuous, seemingly always slipping from his grasp.
The originality and impact of the film lies in the way Keller subverts the standard audience expectation: that at some point the swirl of mystery and confusion surrounding identity, time and location, will be resolved into something approximating coherence. Of course, no such resolution is available to Anthony, nor will it ever be. No one with Anthony’s affliction ever comes out the other side. And so, as an audience, we are left to wonder if Anthony’s daughter, played with an appropriate mix of stoicism and weary resigned frustration by Olivia Colman, is actually divorced or still married to the gruff and abusive husband portrayed by Rufus Sewell? And is she living in Paris or not? And was there ever really a painting by his daughter over the fireplace in his apartment? And is the character of Bill, as portrayed by Mark Gatiss, really his former son-in-law, or a senior staff member at the nursing home where Anthony finds himself at the film’s end?
Or, as seems increasingly, likely, has Anthony been in the nursing home all along, and the film’s previous events have just been broken shards of memory randomly colliding in his disordered mind?
The Father has its origins as a stage play, and its one defect is to have an excessively stagebound feel at times. But this is a minor quibble with a film that is never more resonant than now, in our anxious age with its rapidly ageing population. Hopkins may have played the most infamous psychopath in cinema history, but as The Father, he has created his most genuinely terrifying character.