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‘The Son’ Review: Father Doesn’t Know Best
Hugh Jackman plays the father of a troubled teenager in Florian Zeller’s leaden drama.
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By Natalia Winkelman
At one point in “The Son,” directed by Florian Zeller and based on his play of the same name, a clinician briefs a divorced mother and father on their teenage son’s condition after a mental health emergency. “He’s in very good hands now,” the doctor says, referring to the hospital staff. “Now” is the key word; the implication is that the wealthy, well-meaning Peter (Hugh Jackman) and Kate (Laura Dern) are unfit to handle the issues their son Nicholas (Zen McGrath) is facing.
In my professional opinion (I’m a critic, not a physician), the same should be said of the movie surrounding Nicholas, which tackles adolescent depression about as deftly as an estate lawyer performing open-heart surgery. Despite its contemporary New York City setting, “The Son” seems to have appropriated a midcentury understanding of mental illness, and the emotion on display feels even more artificial than the rooftop vista erected outside the windows of Peter’s industrial-chic Manhattan loft.
Peter shares this apartment with his wife, Beth (Vanessa Kirby), and their infant son, and though his work as an attorney is consuming, he relishes his downtown idyll. But the sweetness curdles when Peter learns that Nicholas, who lives with Kate in Brooklyn, has been acting volatile and would prefer to move in with him. Never mind that the teenager is friendless, cutting class and has taken to self-harm; Kate and Peter agree that a change of scenery will restore the cheerful child they raised. (We eventually meet a 6-year-old Nicholas in flashbacks that are so euphoric they could double as airline commercials.)
The leadenness of “The Son” is puzzling given the ingenuity of Zeller’s “The Father,” which positions the audience within the point of view of an aging man with dementia. (The film won two Oscars in 2021.) Unlike that triumph of subjectivity, “The Son” declines to probe the perspectives of Peter or Nicholas, compelling the audience to survey the wreckage of their relationship from a distance. It also leaves the actors seeming somewhat stranded, trading clunky lines or lurching into tantrums without the psychological depth to underpin their affliction. The movie may take place inside a pit of despair, but the theatrics leave us with the uncanny sensation of feeling nothing at all.
The Son Rated PG-13. Divorce and remorse. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters.
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‘The Son’ Review: Hugh Jackman Goes Deep in ‘The Father’ Director’s Devastating Follow-up
On the strength of his 2020 Oscar win, playwright-turned-helmer Florian Zeller assembles a stellar cast — including newcomer Zen McGrath — to explore another dimension of mental health.
By Peter Debruge
Peter Debruge
Chief Film Critic
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From Sophocles to Shakespeare, it all comes back to family. Writers can get as high-concept as they like, but in the end, the world’s greatest storytellers recognize that nothing is more potent — not even romantic love — than the connections between children and their parents. Florian Zeller gets it. Before turning his attention to the screen, the gifted French scribe wrote at least a dozen plays, the most acclaimed of which were a trilogy focusing on how mental health issues devastate seemingly functional bourgeois families: “The Mother” (depression), “The Father” (dementia) and “ The Son ” (you’ll see).
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Instead of feeling loose and lived in, Zeller’s adaptation of his own play has a slightly heightened quality, not to be confused with “theatrical”: The sets feel disconcertingly under-decorated, as if the characters were living in an Ikea showroom. The sound design has been dialed down, such that sirens and street noise (a New York near-constant) barely register. The dialogue, adapted into English with Christopher Hampton’s help, suggests what people might say in such a situation. These very concerns have fueled countless TV movies, and yet, Zeller is going for the most “tasteful” possible treatment. Instead of merely wrenching us emotionally — which “The Son” will inevitably succeed in doing anyway — he wants to get audiences thinking.
Study the dynamic between father and son carefully, and you’ll spot a fascinating trick at work, even subtler than the sleight of hand Zeller used to make audiences feel as if they were slowly losing their minds (like Hopkins’ character) in “The Father”: In the role of Peter, Jackman becomes a man caught up in his own kind of performance. The seldom-home workaholic desperately wants to be perceived as an ideal patriarch but seems to know (or suspect) deep down that he’s a failure in that department. That means Jackman is essentially playing a man playing a dad.
If you doubt this reading, consider one of the film’s defining scenes, when Peter takes a rare break from work to see his own dad (Anthony Hopkins as Anthony, a different father from “The Father”) to let him know he’s thinking of turning down a D.C. politician’s offer to oversee his campaign, since Nicholas needs him. It seems to Peter like the right call, but Anthony sees right through his agenda. “Your daddy wasn’t nice to you. So what?” he spits. “Just fucking get over it!”
And therein emerges another dimension of Jackman’s character, who hails from a generation in which shutting one’s mouth and enduring the pain is seen as a sign of personal strength. Today, emotional maturity is associated with the opposite qualities: the capacity to identify one’s trauma and accept treatment, as Nicholas tries to do. To his credit, when not too distracted with work, Peter does try to communicate with his son. It’s through one of these conversations that Peter learns that the boy is deeply traumatized by his parents’ split. This revelation isn’t offered as an “explanation” so much as a clue. Nicholas clearly feels betrayed and abandoned by his father. Life, he says, is “weighing me down.”
“The Son” isn’t an easy watch, but it’s an important one at a time when young people are very much in crisis. Just look at the statistics, and it’s clear that depression, self-harm and suicide are up in alarming rates among teenagers — and that’s even before you factor in the challenges of the pandemic. When Nicholas asks his father about the rifle he noticed in the laundry room, it’s not clear whether this disgruntled teen plans to use it on his classmates or himself. Ask Chekhov how you ought to feel for the rest of the film.
Beth is frightened, but tries her best to be a caring stepmother, as in an atypically light scene when she pressures Peter to demonstrate his “famous hip sway.” Out comes a glimpse of the goofball behind Hugh Jackman’s star persona. Between this and “Bad Education,” we’re seeing a new chapter of his career, as Jackman subsumes his natural charisma in order to suggest Peter’s fundamental insecurity: He wants to break the cycle, to be a better dad than the one he had. But he doesn’t understand what he’s up against, and in watching “The Son” play out, this family’s tragedy becomes our own, and Zeller’s warning becomes impossible to ignore.
Reviewed at Sepulveda Screening Room, Aug. 30, 2022. In Venice, Toronto film festivals. Running time: 123 MIN.
- Production: (U.S.-France-U.K.) A Sony Pictures Classics release of a Film4, Ingenious presentation, in association with Cross City Films, Embarkment Films, of a See-Saw Films, IntoTheVoid production. Producers: Joanna Laurie, Iain Canning, Emile Sherman, Florian Zeller, Christophe Spadone. Executive producers: Simon Gillis, Philippe Carcassonne, Hugh Jackman, Daniel Battsek, Ollie Madden, Lauren Dark, Peter Touche, Christelle Conan, Hugo Grumbar, Tim Haslam.
- Crew: Director: Florian Zeller. Screenplay: Christopher Hampton, Florian Zeller, based on the play “Le Fils” by Florian Zeller. Camera: Ben Smithard. Editor: Yorgos Lamprinos. Music: Hans Zimmer.
- With: Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, Zen McGrath, Hugh Quarshie, Anthony Hopkins.
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‘the son’ review: hugh jackman is outstanding in florian zeller’s otherwise unrewarding dirge.
Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby and Zen McGrath also star in this installment of the playwright-turned-director’s trilogy on mental health and its brutal impact on families, premiering in Venice competition.
By David Rooney
David Rooney
Chief Film Critic
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Peter has settled into a contented life in Brooklyn with his new partner, Beth ( Vanessa Kirby ), and their infant son when ex-wife Kate ( Laura Dern ) turns up at the door distraught about their 17-year-old child from that marriage. Nicholas has been skipping school for a month with no explanation, risking expulsion, and his coldness toward his mother scares her. Peter promises to talk to him.
Like a “Master of the Universe,” only without the ego, Peter works from a sleek steel and glass Midtown Manhattan tower with breathtaking views. He’s been offered his dream job, on a promising political campaign in D.C. But what should be a period of exciting change turns into one of narrowing options as the extent of Nicholas’ problems becomes clear. Suddenly, Peter’s attention is pulled away from work and his unresolved feelings about his own unhappy childhood resurface, making him strive to do better as a parent.
The best scene in The Son is the brief appearance of the Oscar-winning lead of The Father , Anthony Hopkins , playing Peter’s well-heeled political careerist dad. Lunch at the latter’s stately Washington home is a coolly civil affair until Peter starts in on the old man’s parental failings, turning him instantly defensive: “Just fucking get over it.” More of this kind of savage bite would have brought needed tonal variation to Zeller’s one-note new movie.
Retreating deeper inside himself, Nicholas refuses to return Kate’s calls, while Peter reassures his ex-wife that the boy is doing much better, only seeing what he wants to see. Peter continues to cling to memories of what a happy kid his son was, returning in his mind to an idyllic family boating vacation in Corsica. He finds himself spouting the same platitudes that made him resent his own father.
The sole moment of relief — aside from the Corsica flashbacks and a characteristically Zeller-esque deception near the end — is a happy evening during which Beth coaxes Peter into busting out the dance stylings that first caught her eye. Nicholas loosens up enough to mimic his dad’s exuberantly goofy moves as unfamiliar laughter erupts from him. But that’s not much of a lifeline of hope to throw your audience.
Any parent or relative who has had to experience the sorrow of watching a child shut themselves off from the world will no doubt be moved by this distressing scenario and by the hard questions it reveals. It’s admirable that Zeller — working with his longtime translator and screenwriting collaborator Christopher Hampton — declines to try analyzing suicidal depression. Instead, he presents it as a private hell that provides no access for the people who love Nicholas.
As with so many children of divorce, Nicholas’ loyalties bounce abruptly in any given moment between his parents, even sometimes doing a persuasive impersonation of being at peace with them both. But he’s never at peace with himself, as much as Peter and Kate try to convince themselves otherwise.
While Zeller’s psychodramas are serious to a fault, they toy with distorted reality, designed to keep the audience as disoriented as the respective title characters. But in this case, there are too few gray areas in the character study, and McGrath is too green an actor to fool anyone into thinking Nicholas is getting it together. That makes the drama one of grim inevitability, appropriately accompanied by Hans Zimmer’s somber orchestral score.
The always watchable Dern is as unchallenged here as she was in the dismal Jurassic World Dominion earlier this summer, merely called upon to fret and plead. Kirby has more to work with, as Beth becomes torn between her commitments as a new mother and responsibility toward her partner to do what she can for a teenager who is openly hostile toward her. The strain on Beth’s relationship with Peter is played with palpable tension and a welcome brittle edge by Kirby beneath the good intentions.
But this is Jackman’s movie. He makes Peter’s helplessness intensely moving as he keeps trying, against mounting odds and false breakthroughs, to communicate with a child who remains out of reach. Sadly, that goes for The Son , as much as the son.
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