coffeeandirony.org

And When Did You Last See Your Father begins with a promise and ends with a song, and provides nothing in between. The promise is the brilliant title, the song is the brilliant ending scene, and the rest is, as the British would say, horrid. It looked like a film with a great deal of potential; a story of fathers and sons, relationships and memories, a British indie-type drama starring Colin Firth, based on a best-selling memoir by Blake Morrison…only now do I realize that all of that is just wrapping, colorful, interesting wrapping functioning as excellent marketing directed at people exactly like me. AWDYLSF won exactly one award – for best trailer. Which it deserved, for And When Did You Last See Your Father, while technically all of the things that it promises in the trailer, is really none of them. It’s not a story of fathers and sons because ultimately, Colin Firth and his father have no relationship in the film. Firth’s character spends most of the film abjectly hating his father, and while he ultimately reconciles this in the end and forgives his father, they never actually reconcile or interact in any meaningful way. The film, ultimately, is about sex and death – mostly sex.

Blake’s childhood is characterized by two things: stifled, impotent hatred of his father and equally stifled, impotent sexual desire. The film takes these two themes, mixes them together in an ugly, inarticulate mess, and that, essentially, is the storyline. Which makes for a highly depressing film. From infidelity to masturbation to plain old lust, there’s not much uplifting or creative about what goes on in this film; it subscribes to the modern theory that all males, from childhood to adolescence and to some degree into adulthood and old age, are slaves to their sexual desires, and that these desires come out in all kinds of forms and compose most of the male inner life, particularly in youth. Which is a disgusting theory if you subscribe to it and a depressing one even if you do.

Did I mention the pace? The film crawls – literally crawls(and I have a fairly high degree of tolerance) – through 92 minutes in which not much happens. There’s scenes of young Blake and his father, and then older Blake and his father, and then his father’s infidelity/stupidity, and then adolescent, miserable Blake and his(still-cheating) father, and so on and so forth until the end of time. Incredibly, incredibly slow-moving, not just in terms of action but also camera-work(there was one scene toward the end of the film when I swear the camera took a good five minutes to cross one room), no normal/average individual will be able to get through much of this.

Then there’s the fact that the film didn’t make me care about any of the characters. They’re all so ordinary, so dysfunctional and uninteresting, and Blake and his father in particular can be so degradingly base in their actions, it’s hard to like any of them. And a film is ultimately made or broken on the strength of its characters.

Finally, and perhaps worst of all, the film provides no resolution to the two problems it presents; Blake’s relationship with his father and his unsatisfied lust/desires. By the end of the film, Blake has made a sort of peace with the past, looking over his memories of his father and reconciling with them, but nothing has really changed – nothing constructive has come out of it. His father lived as an adulterous, charming but fickle man whose inability to love his wife and children in the way they needed to be loved made their lives miserable, and he dies as that same man. The film opens with one of the last times Blake will see his father coherent and active; at a ceremony in which Blake is receiving a literary award – a ceromony during which the course of which his father openly mourns to guests that his son did not become a doctor and critisizes the award for being plastic. His father is, in many ways, a good man – he means no harm – but he is also a narrow-minded and selfish one, and so he recklessly hurts his family – and Blake spends most of his life hating and despising him for this(rightly, in my opinion, insofar as hate can ever be right). His father never understood him – never tried to – and he dies without ever having any real conversation with his son, without ever really knowing him. And yet, in the face of this, and in the face of a series of flashbacks through which the film unfolds which reveal all of his father’s bad qualities, Blake somehow is able to forgive him, and seemingly move on; a difficult thing, but a shining one if it had been handled rightly. Sadly, it is not; we are told instead of convinced that Blake is able to forgive and let go, and so this problem simply fades out rather than being resolved.

Secondly, the question of Blake’s unresolved lust seems, well, unresolved to the end. He nearly commits infidelity, just like his father, while staying at his father’s house, and there’s a (non-graphic, but uncomfortable) scene of him masturbating in a bathtub – not much has changed, apparently. He refrains, in the end, from infidelity, and goes back to his wife and all is happy – but again, it is an unsatisfactory and ultimately unconvincing wrap-up.

What makes it all so disappointing, aside from the brilliance of the title, is the fact that the film is characterized by stellar performances – Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent, particularly the latter, inhabit their characters with amazing grace and skill. And the film ends, oddly enough(bookended by a good title and good ending scene) with one brilliant scene, the one moment in which I can really see why Blake loves his father is able to forgive him, the one moment we really see a connection between them. Light blinds the room, and they stand together smiling over a job well-done, and then his father turns, in a moment utterly representative of him, and demands briskly, “Well, what’s next?”

Unfortunately for And When Did You Last See Your Father, a promise and a song aren’t enough; one scene at the end of a film can’t make up for the rest of the movie.