In a meta-accomplishment that is owed kudos, Florian Zeller goes from The Father to The Son in a misguided misfire that attempts one idea: trauma is inherited from father to son.
When Florian Zeller’s debut feature The Father premiered at Sundance in 2020, it was met with rapturous acclaim. It was praised for its fascinating structure and for using the protagonist’s dementia to create an unreliable narrator, which in turn was a way of involving audiences in the story. It provided an insight into the central character, had emotional resonance and came from a place of empathy, earning itself numerous accolades; including the Best Actor Oscar which went, controversially, to Anthony Hopkins for his performance as the titular Father. Safe to say, a follow up in the form of a spiritual companion piece was much desired.
In contemporary New York, new father Peter Miller (Hugh Jackman) holds his new-born baby boy in his hands when there is a knock at the door. Standing there is his ex-wife, Kate (Laura Dern). Hers is an unwelcome arrival, given the mother of the child in Peter’s arms happens to be the woman with whom he cheated. She has arrived despondent with a zealous panic in her voice, as hers and Peter’s son Nick (Zen McGrath) has not been to school for the last month. Naturally, this worries them both. After they confront the teenager, Nick tells them that he is depressed, and wants to be closer to his baby brother. He cites that he needs a change. After moving in, this family melodrama tackling teenage depression begins to take shape.
The error The Son makes is that this is not really the story of a depressed teenager and the struggles that befall him. This is in fact the story of parental failure, shot from the perspective of a parent who does everything wrong. While this perspective is a valid one to tackle, it relies on the audience engaging with their knowledge of the child. It is a perspective that can be done successfully, such as in William H Macy’s Rudderless. In that film, the audience got to know the child from a reminiscent viewpoint, as the protagonist mourned them. It showed how, through their distance and parental actions, the audience was unaware of the depression. In The Son, we are instead witnessing all of this happen, which leads it to becoming an extremely frustrating experience since Peter and Kate are both aware of their son’s anxieties, and are neglectful in their actions to help Nick, who is seen to be doing everything possible to get help.
In a tearful exchange around the mid-point, he tells his mother “I’m not well” – which is Zeller’s only interest in the character of Nick. There is a slight inference that he enjoys writing, but it is the only apparent trait of a character who is the film’s driving force. Nick is dimensionless, with Zeller not giving any visual frame of reference for how Nick was before his parents got divorced – which is the overly simplistic (and only) main cause for his depression. This is the only information we truly have about the emotional centre point in The Son. By making this about Peter and his response to a depressed, suicidal son, Zeller appropriates Nick’s pain for a parent who is undeserving of the sympathy Zeller wants us to feel yet spends so little time earning.
Adapting from his own play, Le Fils, Zeller forgoes the aspect that the play revolves around. The synopsis for Zeller’s play states “…(his father) will do everything to save him and give him back the taste for life.” Jackman plays Peter like he has done everything possible for Nick, but every conflict revolves around how it affects his life. He can’t take that job in Washington? Poor father. At one point, Jackman screams at his son that he’s also allowed to live a life. It’s such a selfish perspective to take against an emotionally tormented 17-year-old, which becomes Zeller’s whole spiel here. Everything revolves around Peter, and because the film leaves so little time for Peter to repent or feel pensive for anyone but himself, its horribly misguided ending feels manipulative and insincere.
As previously mentioned, The Son is about generational trauma but the one scene that involves Peter visiting his father Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) is full of cliché and thinly veiled, failed attempts at nuance. Anthony is not remorseful, and acts like a Disney villain monologuing his way through the base premise. Which, if that obtuse method of delivering its point was not enough, Peter returns from this having learned nothing. Speaking to new partner Beth (Vanessa Kirby), he says how aware he is that what he’s saying to Nick is the same exact way his father speaks to him but he ‘can’t help it’ – the script removes any agency and fault to be put on Peter’s shoulders for the reasoning that his father was even more neglectful.
Zen McGrath’s performance as the depressed, trembling juvenile Nick is perfectly adequate for what little he has in terms of character with which to work. Peter’s dialogue in saying how sensitive and caring the young Nick was comes across as lazy shorthand for character building instead of Zeller directing McGrath to show this. The same can be said for Vanessa Kirby’s Beth, a character who has little to do other than cause conflict in Peter’s life. Kirby is magnificent in the little screen time she has, with a supporting turn that had so much potential in seeing a distinct perspective away from Peter’s tunnel vision.
Hopkins is playing the same named character as the one he plays in The Father, but any link between the two is not apparent beyond that. If it is indeed the same character, the chronology between the two films become fuzzy. The welsh actor pontificates through his scenes, his grandstanding a complete flanderization of what the character could be. Jackman is resoundingly miscast, or at least has too little notion on what his character is doing. Jackman is doing everything possible to invoke an emotional response from audiences, but The Son’s script is so shallow and performative that you can barely believe its brazen superficiality. Such issues remove anything worthwhile from Jackman’s performance.
Unfortunately for fans of The Father and its emotionally empathetic perspective, Zeller’s The Son really struggles to capture a modicum of that bandwidth. At its best, it’s a disingenuous melodrama, failing to engage audiences with a perspective to sympathise with beyond the skin-deep manipulation on screen. At its worst, its a problematic rendition of teenage depression that attempts to remove all parental responsibility from the neglect of their son.
The Son is available to watch at your retailer of choice.
Learn more about the film at the official site for the title.
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