Far From the Tree
French playwright-turned-filmmaker Florian Zeller stays in his comfort zone with ‘The Son’… unfortunately.
the Son
Director: Florian Zeller • Writers: Christopher Hampton, Florian Zeller, based on the play by Zeller
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, Zen McGrath, Anthony Hopkins
UK / USA / France • 2hrs 4mins
Opens Hong Kong January 12 • IIA
Grade: B-
Who, may I ask, is the son? No, seriously, that’s an honest query for The Son, French dramatist and now filmmaker Florian Zeller’s follow-up to The Father, which won star Anthony Hopkins an Oscar in 2021. That movie was a true marvel of form, structure and editing, and first-timer Zeller showed off an uncanny ability to manipulate the medium in the best way possible. The Father was about an elderly man struggling with dementia, which Zeller visualised through constant shifts in what the space the action took place in looked like; same for the faces of the man’s family (Zeller swapped out actors for the same roles from one scene to the next). It was confusing and frustrating to watch, and few films recently have so effectively conveyed the emotion on screen to the audience.
In The Son, a teenager’s unfocused unhappiness is a problem to be solved by his buttoned-up dad, but for some bizarre reason the son becomes the secondary player in his own story. Zeller’s focus on the father and the straws he increasingly grasps at turns the story into a sort of The Father 1.5. It’s hard to tell who the film’s about despite the title, and because of that much of its potency is diluted by the time the inevitable third act rolls around. And for the record, yes. There is a third play, chronologically speaking the first (because of course the guys get films first), indeed called The Mother. No word on whether or now there will be an adaptation of that one too.
Like Father not like Son
Peter Miller (Hugh Jackman) is a classic New York, hotshot lawyer Alpha male, living in a swank, exposed brick brownstone and working from a corner office with a view of the Empire State Building. Like any good Alpha male he’s got an ex-wife, Kate (Laura Dern), a 17-year-old son with her, Nicholas (Australian actor Zen McGrath, who gets kudos for saying “Toronto” correctly), and naturally a much younger second wife, Beth (Vanessa Kirby), who’s just given birth to another son. Kate turns up one day, frantic (“frantic” makes up the bulk of the demands put on Dern), talking about how Nicholas is skipping school – for, like, months on end – becoming more and more withdrawn and scaring her. Despite the mess Kate makes of Peter’s carefully curated and compartmentalised life, he lets Nicholas come live with him and Beth – much to her chagrin. She’s just had a baby, Peter works all the time, and Nicholas is either hostile or apathetic to her existence. But guess who’s going to have to deal with him most of the time?
This is where the familial stress comes into the picture. At first Nicholas seems to be doing okay, he’s trying, but he quickly backslides into the same patterns he did while with Kate, leaving Peter to squirm and scheme to find an answer. The harder he tries the more Nicholas resists and the farther he feels from everyone. The icing on the cakes comes when Beth flatly refuses Nicholas as a babysitter one night, bluntly telling Peter his other son is “not right in the head.” The statement just makes Peter double down on “fixing” Nicholas, and in doing so makes himself into the same icy tyrant as his own father (Anthony Hopkins in an utterly blistering five minutes). This is all going to go to shit, and we know it.
The Son may hit more for anyone with children, and to Zeller’s enormous credit, Nicholas’s depression is never given an identifiable source. The more Peter tries to assign blame or causality or logic, the more Nicholas slips away – and anyone who’s ever dealt with someone with depression will instantly recognise the veracity of it. There’s no answer, which is a big part of the problem, and saying “cheer up” or going to the zoo doesn’t help. That massive grey area is The Son’s greatest strength, and if you’re the kind of viewer who wants answers for all the questions in their narratives… steer clear. But Zeller misfires by focusing so much on Peter and the loose connections between Peter’s behaviour and his own father’s, and ultimately diverting our attention away from Nicholas and towards Peter’s parental trauma. On top of that Zeller only flirts with stylistic functions he did in his first film, and it keeps Nicholas at arm’s length. Was that intentional? Was the son of the title always Peter? Maybe, but starting with Nicholas’s POV says otherwise. Of course, it may be just as well given that as an actor McGrath lacks the nuance demanded of the role. He comes off more brat than troubled. Thankfully, Jackman and especially Kirby are there to pick up the slack. Jackman hands in probably the best performance of his career that didn’t involve singing, and The Son is his film, even if it shouldn’t be. But Kirby. Kirby (Mission Impossible: Fallout, The Crown) manages a tightrope act balancing tolerant support of her husband with just the right self-protective “Not my problem” edge that makes her eminently relatable. You will mutter “Hell, yes, girl!” under your breath more than once during her best moments. If Zeller decides to make The Mother about Beth, sign me up. — DEK