When Did You Last See Your Father?

Directed by Anand Tucker

This father-son parable – adapted from author Blake Morrison’s memoir of the same title – sticks to tired family melodrama conventions, merely touching on much broader and more interesting material. The cast, admittedly, is outstanding. Colin Firth plays the adult Blake to Jim Broadbent’s dying father Arthur, and Juliet Stevenson’s selfless mother Kim. The film bounces through time as child, teenage and adult Blake grapples with daddy’s perpetual adolescence. The film is undoubtedly elegant, with colorful sets and costumes signaling flashback scenes while a drab and muted palette renders the melancholy present. However, muddled connections between micro- and macro-histories keep Morrison’s straightforward family narrative from achieving greater thematic breadth.

Steeped in signifiers of quintessential middle-class British-ness – rolling hills, Scottish maids, pubs and cottages – there’s another film here about the death of an older England. Sadly, that film surfaces rarely, and then only briefly. Instead things devolve into patented tear-jerking, and here Tucker wears a few old tricks really, really thin. In the penultimate scene a spinning, time-ripped, Vertigo-quoting father-son embrace obnoxiously announces Blake’s liberating epiphany. Just as glaring, a good third of Tucker’s film is shot in bedroom mirrors. Now granted, a few shots refracted through blurred reflections or obstructed by objects in the foreground intimates nicely that family history is unreliable, but come on! What could have been a beautiful period piece about the rebirth of a son, the death of a father (and with him, an entire way of life), is little more than a series of pretty family photo album reminiscences.

A similar review appeared in The L Magazine.