Hugh Jackman and Vanessa Kirby in The Son
(Picture: AP)Where Florian Zeller goes, awards follow. Or so we thought. The Frenchman’s adaptation of his own devastatingly playful, Alzheimer’s-themed play The Father, rightly won Anthony Hopkins a Best Actor award at the Oscars. When Hugh Jackman was cast in Zeller’s next project, one headline read, “ With ‘The Son’, Hugh Jackman’s Best Actor moment has arrived.”
The theory was that the role of Peter Miller – the deluded father of a chronically depressed teen – would bring the 54-year-old Jackman the one big award that eludes him. But no. How did he fail to notice that Zeller and Christopher Hampton’s script, for the most part, is a simplistic, over-earnest mess?
Just to be clear, Jackman and his colleagues Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby and Anthony Hopkins (as, respectively, Peter’s ex-wife Kate, his much-younger new wife Beth, and his dad) are superb. And a few sequences are sublime.
Jackman’s character is a workaholic New York-based lawyer, on the verge of landing a dream job in Washington. But then Kate shows up at his door, saying their 17-year-old son Nicholas (Zen McGrath) wants to come and live with Peter’s family.
Beth – looking after their new baby – isn’t keen, but Peter throws money at the problem. When that fails to fix Nicholas’ unhappiness, Peter visits his own dad, which produces one of the best scenes of the year. In his father’s palatial home, Peter wears the expression of someone invited to play lawn croquet, only to find themselves being smashed in the face with a mallet. In a matter of seconds, we totally understand why Peter, despite all his good intentions, is a disastrous parent.
Dern ensures that we feel for Kate, too. Addled by anxiety, this woman is an open book that no one she loves wants to read. Damn, Dern is good.
Look out, by the way, for the glossy and ambitious French intern at Peter’s office, played by Gabriel Ecoffey, Zeller’s step-son, whose issues partly inspired the stage production (the film is dedicated to him). What a nifty move on Zeller’s part, to make him the film’s golden boy. On a subliminal level, we’re being reminded that misery is not set in stone.
Then again, Zeller’s boasts about dispensing with rehearsals for The Son are unlikely to have done the less experienced actors, such as McGrath, any favours. And the script’s focus on Peter, and some sub-Chekhovian plotting, wrecks the film as a whole. Nicholas’s pain should overwhelm us. It doesn’t, because it’s not allowed to.
As melodramas go, it’s so much better than the recently released film The Whale. But is that enough? The Father was always going to be a hard act to follow. Sadly, with The Son, Zeller doesn’t even come close.
123 mins, cert 15
