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A Story About the Profound Heartache of Living with Dementia
Anthony Hopkins gives a tour de force performance: A review of the award-winning film ‘The Father’
As a masterclass in acting, it would be hard to beat Anthony Hopkins’ stellar performance as Anthony in The Father. Olivia Colman, playing his daughter Anne, delivers a different, though no less engaging, performance. It’s no surprise that the film and both actors were nominated for numerous awards, and won many. Hopkins won the Best Actor Oscar at the 2021 Academy Awards and Colman was nominated as Best Supporting Actress.
Hopkins plays an 83-year-old man with dementia. In an opening scene, taken to task by his daughter for insulting his caregiver, the actor’s eyes and his body language convey, in a close-up, the personality of a man of arrogant intelligence who is smarter than most and who knows it. Yet, in the same moving scene, the daughter (and the viewer) senses in those eyes that her father, though he angrily dismisses the very idea, has an inkling of his ailment and its implications.
In this film, as in so many others, Hopkins achieves much of his cinematic impact through his facial expressions and his penetrating eyes. Few actors can successfully pull that off. Not surprisingly, director Florian Zeller makes frequent use…
