London,

And When Did You Last See Your Father?

Your rating

Click on a star to rate

Cert: 12A

Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
 Add your review

Dir: Anand Tucker. Cast: Colin Firth, Jim Broadbent, Juliet Stevenson, Matthew Beard

 

Description: Estranged from his domineering father Arthur and now happily married to Kathy, successful writer Blake continues to avoid healing the wounds of the past. When Arthur is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Blake is compelled to return to the Yorkshire Dales to reconnect with his old man and the rest of the clan: mother Kim and sister Gillian.

Country: UK. 2007. 92mins

• 
• 
• 

My father and other animals

 

Driven to distraction: Jim Broadbent is Arthur, the father determined to make a man of Blake, played, as a youth, by Matthew Beard

Success on his own terms: Colin Firth as modern-day Blake the award-winning writer

Look here too

• DVDs of the week
• Cinema listings

Anand Tucker's adaptation of Blake Morrison's moving memoir of a difficult yet loved father has one huge advantage: the acting. Of a particularly British kind, it's often understated and never forced but also wonderfully expressive without ever pushing what is a quietly observed drama into sentimental melodrama.

Otherwise, this is one of those commendably well-made and a trifle old-fashioned films which nowadays will probably find as large an audience on television as in the cinema. Given a sensitive and faithful screenplay from David Nicholls (Starter for 10), and direction from Tucker that seldom puts a foot wrong, it's about how parents form their children, sometimes leaving scars of which they are totally unaware.

In this case, Father (Jim Broadbent) is not a bad man, and would certainly be an amusing old cove to meet. He delights in saving money, getting something for nothing by using old tickets to get into race meetings, and entertaining guests with jolly jokes. He appears to be the life and soul of the party and definitely the centre of attention.

He doesn't treat his son (Matthew Beard as a boy, and then Colin Firth) that badly either. He teaches him to drive on the beach, takes him on damp but jolly exploratory camping holidays and tries with all his might to make a man of him. Or rather, a man like him. But he is also one who can't help both intimidating and patronising first the boy and then the man, while inadvertently turning his devoted wife (Juliet Stevenson) into half the woman she really is.

His disappointment in her is reflected in his constant flirtation, and possible affair, with another woman (Sarah Lancashire) who may have borne him a daughter. His disappointment with his son has its basis in the fact that he wanted him to be a medic like himself and not the writer he becomes. It is a family not exactly unhappy but one, like so many, with enough underlying tensions that its members are never completely at peace with each other.

The story is developed in a series of flashbacks, mostly from the moment when Father is diagnosed with incurable cancer and lies slowly dying at home, complaining of his fate. Blake is then 40 and an established author with a wife and two children, doubting that his father will ever accept him.

Earlier, he is very well played by Beard, who expresses with skill the sexual-torments of adolescence and his resentment of the father he once adored. But in this sort of intimate, relationship-driven work, it's the senior actors on whom you rely, and they don't let you down for a moment.

Broadbent accepts a gift of a part with well-observed abandon; Firth gives a lesson in vulnerability without seeming unduly weak or neurotic; and Stevenson's portrait of Mother manages with a dozen tiny details to show us the constraints of her lifelong love for a man who may have betrayed her. What can she do with a husband who, holding her hand as he lies dying, tells her, as if to congratulate himself, that the two of them have had a happy enough life together?

This is a film you don't expect to be as good as it is or to probe as deeply into feelings practically all of us experience at some time.

It's small in scale, perhaps, and burdened with a score that is the only insistently sentimental aspect to the whole affair.

But it talks eloquently, sometimes in almost a whisper, about how we are all shaped, whether we like it or not, by people we learn to love in death, but often resent in life.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

What's on today   What's on tomorrow