‘The father’ was one of the biggest surprises of last season, a terrific dementia drama with an impressive Anthony Hopkins. It was, then, a matter of time before its director, Florian Zeller, perhaps the best-known name in French theater today, made a new adaptation of one of his works. But everything that worked in his previous film here is stopped. And in the end, ‘The Son’ seems to have learned nothing from ‘The Father’.
family matter
‘El hijo’ orbits constantly on the same topic: adolescent depression. We have seen different approaches in recent years, but it is always interesting to see what a young director who once dazzled the world is able to tell (and how) to shed new light on the problem. But Zeller never quite gets his approach right, which swings between constant yelling, the obvious, moments of adolescent angst and simple characters that try to deal with an excessively complex problem. So to speak, Zeller is too big for him.
You know you have a problem in your movie when not even Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern and Anthony Hopkins can lift it. The three of them do what they can, but the script, which in theater was described as one of the best works of the decade, doesn’t work when taken to the screen. Everything seems exaggerated and artificial, trying to provoke the continuous crying of the public while instructing them in a matter that the director himself seems not to control.
It doesn’t take much scratching to see what Zeller really wanted to do in ‘The Son’: a drama about the relatives of a teenager with depression and how they face the obstacles that this puts in the way. But in his eagerness for us to understand all sides of this family triangle, he is unable to explain well the idiosyncrasies of his characters, who vary in attitude depending on what the script requires: now I am very tough, now I am playful, now I am a loud husband, now a understanding father. This dance of personalities makes the final product suffer and end up in a sentimental no man’s land.
Little Deception
‘The Son’ forgets something that should have been essential: when it comes to dealing with a broken relationship between a couple who have a child in common, you can’t make the viewer spend more time with one of the two and expect them to understand both at the end. The film falls in love with Hugh Jackman (with good reason) and follows him through a terrifyingly boring day-to-dayincluding a beginning of a political campaign of which nothing else is known and remains as one of the plots started (and never finished) of the film.
But as we see Jackman visiting his father, trying to live a new life with his girlfriend and baby, and patching up his shattered relationship with his teenage son, Laura Dern is missing in action. The emotional equivalence is totally broken when her drama becomes a mere accompaniment to his, despite being vital in the plot and in the relationship with his son. Too much happens in an overloaded movie, but it all happens to a character who, sadly, isn’t even interesting.
However, the performances of these titans are watered down by the strange decision to entrust the most delicate role to Zen McGrathan Australian actor who works more like a transcript of Timothée Chalamet and who unfortunately never ends up taking over the character. He exaggerates, yells, cries and despairs, but he is never capable of giving nuances more than necessary that end up condemning the tape when it becomes nothing more than a recitative paripé. There is no emotion, there is no reality, there is no desire to create something beyond what is written… And it shows.
Saved by the Bell
However, there are moments of ‘The Son’ in which the film flourishes that could have been with a little more care: the impeccable conversation between Hopkins and Jackman where we understand, in five minutes, more about his character than in the rest of the film; the complicit looks between the ex-couple; the few moments in which Nicholas is able to express his problems without set phrases or exacerbated shouting. But they are small oases in what, for the rest, is not so far from what we have come to call socially “afternoon movie on Antena 3”.
The tape has good intentions, but that is not enough: lack of characters and excess of drama, added to some impossible dialogues end up destroying any attempt at truth that could exist in his script. After the narrative complexity of ‘The Father’, which managed to create a very strong protagonist based only on disordered memories, ‘The Son’ feels like a sad step backwards: a terrifyingly conventional film whose mediocrity runs smack dab with an unsuccessful attempt to be “something else” that never stops signing.
It is better than a film based on a small play because of its excessive theatricality to do it because of his lack of real emotions. Zeller has not been successful this time, leaving in doubt his possible closing of the family trilogy with ‘The mother’. Let us hope that he is not one of those examples of directors who, after a dazzling debut, have not been able to get back on track with their careers. At the moment, the adolescent depression of ‘El hijo’ is not convincing neither from the plot point of view nor from the emotional point of view. Two very long hours (with an interminable third act) that, in the end, they serve as a perfect warning to always use contraceptive measures.