TIFF Review: And When Did You Last See Your Father?

Every growing boy swears he will not become his father; every fully-grown man has to come to terms with the fact that, in many ways, he has. That contradiction's the engine for And When Did You Last See Your Father?, a new British drama based on Blake Morrison's book. Blake (Colin Firth) is a husband and father, but when his own father Arthur (Jim Broadbent) enters late-stage terminal cancer, he returns home as a son. Blake's trying to deal with the here-and-now realities of his father's impending death, but his memories of his teen years (where he's played by Matthew Beard) keep coming back, unbidden. ...

And When Did You Last See Your Father? is directed by Anand Tucker, whose last film, Shopgirl, has a few common themes with And When ... . It's a literary adaptation, driven in part by first-person narration. But And When ... is a much less broad film that Shopgirl, where one girl's relationships served as a way of looking at L.A. life in the modern age; in And When ..., Blake's conflicted and confusing recollections of his father are simply what they are.

As Blake, Colin Firth conveys the contradictions of being a fully-grown son; angry at fate, desperate for closure, fully capable of making all the mistakes he saw his father make. Firth's manner in every film suggests a constant struggle between weakness and strength; he lets us see a hint of rot beneath his firmness, or suggests a core of steel behind his hesitancy. As the adult Blake, Firth gives complexity and humanity to what could have been a simple and surface performance in the hands of another actor. But as good as Firth is, Beard (making his feature film debut) is as good, or even better; Beard manages to show the myriad tones within father-son interaction with strong-but- never-showy acting -- the exasperation, the frustration, the moments of shock when you can't quite believe you're enjoying the old man's company.

And, as the old man, Broadbent is excellent. Playing Arthur requires Broadbent to portray bluff bonhomie in the '50s and cancer-ravaged agonies in the late '80s. But Arthur's neither saintly in his whispered dying nor all bad in his vulgar life; Broadbent somehow brings sadness to Arthur's hearty humor and a sense of power to Arthur's bedridden final days. The supporting cast is excellent -- including Gina McKee as Blake's wife and Juliet Stevenson as Arthur's wife -- but Firth, Beard and Broadbent carry the film.

As a director, Tucker may have a few weaknesses -- there's a few too many moments in And When ... where the characters are captured in mirror-reflections -- but he at the very least knows how to get performances out of his cast, and how to get good-looking scenes out of his crew. And the plot and themes of And When ... may be simple, but that doesn't mean they're easy -- especially as Blake's quest to understand his father's sins leads him to commit them. Tucker has a subtle yet from capacity for keeping us focused where another film would look away, for leaving things unspoken that another film would spell out for us. And When Did You Last See Your Father? manages -- in graceful and bleak ways, in unblinking yet sympathetic depictions of family life -- to take an all-too-familiar plot and still find something fresh in it through skillful and well-crafted execution.