End-of-life lessons

It’s easy to see the stage origins of Anthony Hopkins’ latest movie, The Father (playing in theaters and coming to streaming platforms March 26 and rated PG-13 for language), which critics are justly hailing for his tour-de-force performance. Writer-director Florian Zeller adapted the film from his 2012 French play, and nearly all the action takes place in a flat that may be Anthony’s (Hopkins) or may be his eldest daughter, Anne’s—late-stage dementia makes it difficult for him to remember where he is.

But the close set and small cast are the ideal building blocks to illustrate the narrowing that so often comes with the end of life, when the world available to us, both physically and socially, grows so small.

Anne (Olivia Colman) tells him she is moving to France to get married, but even if she weren’t, she’s no longer equipped to see to his needs, so they will have to make arrangements about his care. Anthony blithely wonders who would be interested in her romantically and goes back to fixating on his favorite watch. Anne’s lined face and hunched shoulders show months, possibly years, of bearing her father’s verbal blows. Is it illness making him say these things, or are these the thoughts he’s always had, his tongue loosening as the restraint of a sound mind falls away?

Through Anne, we see the conventional story of dementia—the bone-deep weariness and isolation it causes loved ones and caretakers. But The Father quickly moves past that usual construction and pushes us to experience the story from Anthony’s perspective as well.

Throughout the film, we feel unmoored by time—unsure of when conversations are occurring, or even if they’re occurring at all or are merely figments of Anthony’s increasing paranoia. This confusion creates sympathy that doesn’t come from sentimentality or easy melodrama but from allowing us to experience the world as Anthony does. He is obsessive and frequently cruel. “The thing is she’s not very bright. You know, not very intelligent,” he says of Anne to a horrified nurse. Later, he confesses within earshot of Anne that his younger daughter was always his favorite.

Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Coleman in The Father Sean Gleason/Sony Pictures Classics

But when the scene shifts and we see similar exchanges from Anthony’s point of view, where faces are unrecognizable and adults speak to him slowly and simply as if he’s a child, we wonder how much of his behavior may be a mechanism for exerting control over his fracturing sense of himself.

Anne tries to arrange for a series of home nurses so her father won’t be on his own during the day, but one by one, Anthony chases them off. We see how easy it is for a stranger—only there to collect a wage—to walk away.

In an increasingly aging culture beset by divorce, smaller families, and fewer siblings to shoulder the burden of sick parents, the question of how we honor our fathers and mothers at the end of their lives becomes a crucial part of living out our theology. Good fathers and bad, cruel and kind, will need to lean on children who themselves have fewer networks to rely on for support.

As their absence in The Father illustrates, the ties of extended family, church, and close community may ask much of us in the years of our strength. But when we need them, they pay back exponentially what they take.