And When Did You Last See Your Father?
ALISON ROWAT 
Comment

Star rating: ***

GOT home the other night in time to catch a television programme called 10 Reasons to Hate the Edinburgh Festival, in which the film segment of the annual arts orgy took a drubbing for wallowing in misery. Wheeled out as proof of the EIFF's determination to raise the nation's Prozac intake was Anand Tucker's British drama, adapted from the memoir by Blake Morrison (whose appearance at the Book Festival yesterday is reviewed on the opposite page).

Having spent part of the day watching a Belgian film that featured male rape, a dead baby, and double incontinence, one couldn't help thinking the telly programme might have a point. The swing at Anand was unfair, though. While you couldn't call a movie which has at its heart the last days of a terminally ill man a laugh riot, And When Did You Last See? will have most people leaving the cinema a little more in love with life than they were before.

The cast alone is reason enough to give it a punt. Pride and Prejudice's Colin Firth (not, alas, in wet breeches) plays Blake Morrison, with Jim Broadbent his father, Arthur, and Juliet Stevenson his mother.

Blake's reluctance to spend time with his ailing father is immediately apparent. It is not just the circumstances that distress him but the man himself. His attitude seems cruel, yet through a series of flashbacks showing Blake as boy, teenager and adult, a picture builds up the difficult relationship that has existed over the years between the doctor and his sensitive writer son. We soon understand that the differences between the pair amount to more than a clash of personalities. Every family has its secrets, and the screenplay by David Nicholls is careful to keep the Morrison family skeleton in the closet for as long as possible.

Tucker's film starts its run in cinemas at a slight disadvantage, and not just because of the difficult subject matter. Morrison's memoir was so exquisitely written, and struck such a personal chord with readers, that expectations of the film will be high. Outstanding performances from Broadbent, Firth and Matthew Beard as the teenage Blake aside, And When Did You Last See? struggles to match the book for subtlety, coming across at times as heavy handed. Mercifully, given the events with which the film deals, there's a lot of humour, too. Even the grimmest moments have their lighter side. As in life, so it is in film festivals.

• Dominion, tonight, 8pm; Filmhouse, Saturday, 7.20pm.