And When Did You Last See your Father?
Dir Anand Tucker, featuring Jim Broadbent, Colin Firth, Gina McKee, Juliet Stevenson (PG)
By Joshua Land
Based
on a memoir by Blake Morrison (played here by Colin Firth), When Did
You Last See Your Father? chronicles the death of the writer's dad,
Arthur (Jim Broadbent), from bowel cancer. Extensive flashbacks reveal
a father-son relationship that had more downs than ups, with Broadbent
sinking his teeth into scenes of Arthur's nearly compulsive narcissism:
Always the centre of attention, he's a fast-talking hustler who's
constantly belittling his teenage son, even embarrassing him in front
of prospective girlfriends.
Early scenes are terse - Arthur's
diagnosis is presented simply and directly - and the film is mostly
unflinching in its portrayal of the final stages of dad's life. Even
so, the dynamics are overfamiliar and the whole movie feels vaguely
punitive, an exercise in human misery that's not improved by director
Anand Tucker's rote tear-jerking.
Tamara Jenkins's recent The Savages,
another movie about adult children coming to terms with the legacy of a
flawed, dying father, showed how this kind of material can be leavened
with black comedy in a way that not only doesn't sugarcoat the
characters' pain, but actually enhances our understanding of it. What's
missing from Tucker's film is the sense of how humour can make the
worst of situations more bearable, in movies as in life.