When Did You Last See Your Father? is autobiographical, based on a book by an author who shares a name with the film’s central character. The film tells us in the first few seconds that it is based on a true story. It is an odd admission for so interiorized a film. There are no grand events, historical characters or memorable passages. Just the sort of deeply personal recollections important only to those few people who experienced them — and to the audience privy to them in this plaintive, reflective and affectionate ode to bruised memory and emotional catharsis.
When Did You Last See Your Father? is told from the perspective of Blake Morrison (Colin Firth), a 40-year-old married father of two who makes his living as a poet. It is a profession his surgeon father Arthur (Jim Broadbent) has never truly accepted, gently chastising his son for what he sees as distracting trifles even as Blake reaps the accolades of professional success. The truth is that Blake has never been able to escape his father’s shadow no matter how long or hard he’s tried. It’s not that Arthur was demanding or emotionally severe. Quite the opposite. The senior Morrison is like an overgrown child himself, a boisterous prankster who must always be the center of attention. His domineering personality is like a black hole, inhaling every shred of personality from those around him and profoundly embarrassing those he loves most.
As he grew up, it was a relationship Blake found increasingly untenable. Once on his own, Blake became a fair-weather son, finding it easier to ignore his father’s existence than challenge it. But Blake can no longer avoid his father when Arthur is struck with bowel cancer and begins a steep and rapid decline toward the inevitable. Blake moves back to his family home in the Yorkshire countryside, leaving his wife (Gina McKee) and family in London, so he can join his long-suffering mother Kim (Juliet Stevenson) in caring for the terminally ill Arthur.
The more time Blake spends in the house, the more his unexamined life floods back. For every good memory — his father teaching him how to drive, a camping trip in the rain, his first clumsy sexual encounter with the family’s young housekeeper (Elaine Cassidy) — there are a dozen more charged with humiliation and shame. Putting his father’s affairs in order takes on a deeper, double meaning as Blake is forced to confront suspicions that his father had an affair and fathered a daughter. Arthur continually rebuffs his son’s attempts to revisit the past, and Blake is stuck wrestling with his father’s infidelity even as he contemplates his own.
Colin Firth has been on many people’s radar screens since the consummate A&E production of Pride and Prejudice, though he has only recently started to get the leading man attention he so richly deserves. Father is Firth’s second offering this year, after the moving Then She Found Me. Here he gives a vivid, superlative performance. The reliable Broadbent is equally moving, both as an emotional blusterer and a man in agonizing decline.
When Did You Last See Your Father? is directed by Anand Tucker, who previously helmed the pleasant Shopgirl. The film is directed and lensed with such subtlety and old-fashioned restraint that you might overlook the exquisite cinematic flourishes throughout. The flashbacks glow and burst with color while the modern passages are swathed in cold, soggy grays. Characters are constantly seen in reflection, split by mirrors, suggesting the sort of duplicity inherent in all of us and the varying interpretations that come with viewing events from multiple angles. The beautifully aching score is captured impeccably by composer Barrington Pheloung’s melancholy winds and airborne strings.
When Did You Last See Your Father? is a tender piece of filmmaking. It is a film of questions unasked and unanswered. As Blake is forced to reconcile with the past, he will discover, as we must, that deep fallibility abides even in those we admire the most. Sometimes reconciliation must happen despite not getting the answers we seek and forgiveness must be granted even when it is not requested. In the end, we assume Blake learns the truth about his father, but whether he did or didn’t, the information is none of our business and thus never disclosed to the audience. Either way, only death shows the disenchanted son how strong the bond with his father really was, and that alone allows for the peace he has been so desperately seeking since childhood.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
