Congratulations to Anthony Hopkins for winning the Best Actor Award at the 93rd Academy Awards for "Father Trapped in Time", and the film was also recognized as Best Adapted Screenplay.
The Father is a 2020 feature film directed and written by Florian Zeller, adapted from his 2012 stage play of the same name, starring 83-year-old Anthony Hopkins as Anthony, an elderly man living alone in London with dementia, whose memories become increasingly blurred as he gets older. Cognition is also farther and farther away from reality, and it is often impossible to distinguish between the environment in which they live.
Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman, who plays Anne, Anne, Anthony's daughter, arranges a lot of care and assistance for her father, but is rejected by the suspicious and stubborn Anthony. He would often gush about his daughter or say something rude and insulting. Although she knew that her father was sick, the inexplicable scolding often made Anne hide in the kitchen sadly and secretly wipe her tears. Occasionally, when the father was emotionally stable, he transformed into a kind elder, and a few casual words of praise and thanks made Anne happy. In order to find suitable care, she is busy at work and in life, and the film queen perfectly interprets the heart of her daughter's filial piety to her parents, and also lets people see that there are dementia patients at home, and the pressure and difficulty in nursing care.
The film is jointly produced by the British and French teams, because it is adapted from a stage play into a movie, the narrative has a strong emotional rendering, coupled with Anthony Hopkins' superb and perfect performance, you can strongly feel the dementia trapped in time, the mood of confusion in the movie, you can see many scenes in the movie, but the characters are different, it is difficult to distinguish between the real and the false, these are the memory confusion, fantasy and other diseases that will occur in the dementia.
Excellent script plus good actors, the film has been affirmed by many international film festivals after its launch, and it has been nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture, Best Actor Anthony Hopkins, Best Supporting Actress Olivia Colman (Olivia Colman), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Design, Best Editing and other 6 awards, which is also the sixth time Thatthony Hopkins has impacted the Oscars, and after 25 years of absence, he has won the Oscar again. And became the oldest film finalist ever for the award.
From the murderous doctor to the demented old man, the award-winning Anthony Hopkins is still very exciting this time, and he says to himself at the beginning of the movie: "I was born on Friday, December 31, 1937", which is exactly the same as his own birthday.
The director mentioned in the interview that the reason why he wanted to adapt this award-winning stage play into a movie was because of Anthony Hopkins' acting skills, so he wanted to ask him to star in this role at the beginning, which is why the protagonist is named Anthony.
▲ Anne wants to move to Paris with her lover, but her father's condition is getting worse and worse, making him exhausted, and the newly found caretaker is not trusted by his father, and work, family and care for patients make him tired.
In 2019, Olivia Coleman won an Oscar for "The Favourite", this time playing a middle-aged daughter Anne, a restrained and deep performance, and also won many awards for nominations and affirmations.
▲ It is said that people will become more and more like children when they are old, and an airy gentleman anthony usually likes to listen to opera, but as soon as he meets his daughter to visit him, he immediately degenerates into a three-year-old child, and he nags about the various things that are not in the care.
Anthony was always looking for a watch, and even told his daughter that he suspected that the watch had been stolen by the caretaker, but in fact, it was not, just that he hid it himself, perhaps because of the broken memory and messy, wearing the watch can make him feel at ease, as if his life is still as usual.
▲ British actor Rufus Sewell plays Anne's lover Paul.
▲ Father insisted that his life was very good, saw Anne come to visit him, happy like a child, but sometimes said hurtful words, he kept telling Anne repeatedly that Parisians do not speak English, hoping that she would not move away.
▲ British actress Imogen Gay Poots, who participated in the movie "Jane Eyre", this time played the newly hired caretaker Laura Laura, because she looked a bit like Annie's sister Lucy, which made Anthony have a good impression of her.
When they first met, not only did they invite him to drink, but the old man also danced a neat tap dance, in fact, he had long forgotten that he was once an engineer, and Lucy also died of an accident.
Through editing, the director puts the audience's perspective in the mind of the sick Anthony and lets us experience his confusion as if it were our own confusion.
Anthony found that strange men often appeared in the family, Anne's appearance often made him feel confused, he suspected that his daughter approached him was actually ill-intentioned, seeing that the new caretaker looked very similar to her little daughter Lucy, he couldn't help but think of her who loved to draw, sometimes excited, sometimes silent, and occasionally sitting alone in the corner without saying a word.
When Anne came to see him, Anthony gradually shifted from a brief period of consciousness to a confused state, the mind was sometimes clear and sometimes confused, alternately showing different emotions such as friendliness, coaxing, loss, anger and fear, and the director created various changes in the brain of an old man with dementia from the delicate daily life, facing the ability to degenerate little by little and the loss of memory, which caught him off guard, but he could not dodge, and had to vent his emotions on his daughter.
▲ Three people's dinner, but each has a different mood.
Anne has always been worried about her father's life, and Anthony occasionally thinks of Ann saying that she is moving to Paris with her lover, making him feel abandoned and hurt, so he falls into anger. Anne's lover, Paul, hopes to send her father to a nursing home and give them professional care so that they can return to normal life.
▲ Such a father who struggles with dementia, because of the confused memory and affect his emotions, the director with a rare perspective, let Anthony himself lead the expression, those fragments of his brain, hoping to let the audience understand the patient's feelings.
▲ The last appearance of the caretaker Olivia Williams.
▲ In the blink of an eye, the classic horror film "The Silence of the Lambs" is already a movie 30 years ago, and the ogre has become an old man who is sometimes cute and sometimes snarky.
Mark Gatiss, who has not produced much, is an actor, screenwriter and producer from England.
The character he played this time, as mysterious as his hairline, will suddenly understand at the end, it turns out that he is also a very important person next to Anthony.
The soundtrack of "Father Trapped in Time" is very British gentlemanly, like the soundtrack in "The Land of NoBody", which is also composed by ludovico Einaudi, a contemporary classical composer from Italy, who specially selected three arias from different operas to present Anthony's mood.
▲ 41-year-old director Florian Zeller, originally a French novel and playwright, "Father Trapped in Time" is his film directorial debut, and the first attempt to cry has been affirmed by many parties.
From left: Anthony Hopkins, Florian Zeller, screenplay supervisors Suzanne Renton and Olivia Coleman.
Also about the theme of elderly care and dementia, I personally recommend two other similar films, the 2012 Austrian French film "Amour", in which the old man takes care of his wife who is paralyzed after a stroke, and finally the two go to the end of the road together. And the 2014 American drama film Still Alice, adapted from Lisa Genova's novel of the same name, depicts Alice, a 50-year-old female professor, who faces early-onset Alzheimer's disease and the process her family faces with her.
"Father Trapped in Time" narrative rhythm is bright, the director spent a lot of time, repeatedly presenting Anthony's confused memories and delusions, between the virtual and the real, to distinguish which are real and which are dreams, a bit of a brain-burning for the audience, everyone's relationship with Anthony, but also until the end will suddenly realize, the storyline is very simple, but full of emotional tension, let people be able to integrate into this uneasy atmosphere.
The film is constantly intertwined with Anne and her lover Paul, who have different ideas about taking care of their fathers, in addition to feeling the confusion and pain of dementia, they can also see the huge pressure that their families are under in body and mind, after all, taking care of patients is a terrible nightmare, with current medical research, dementia is still an irreversible disease, can only accept the deteriorating results, no matter how strong the love, may collapse under the pressure of day and night.
There is no past in a person's memory, nor can he see the future, there should be a lot of desperate times, capricious emotions, it is also a kind of torture for the caregiver, most of the film and television works seen at present are from the perspective of the caregiver, to describe the gradual connection between the patient and his relatives, and the impact on life, "Father Trapped in Time" to the patient's own perspective, let people glimpse the chaotic time and memory, the pain caused to the patient.
At the end of the film, Anthony is crying like a child, shouting loudly at Mommy, his memory seems to have degenerated to infancy, this scene makes people look very heartbroken, think back carefully, all the previous plots, whether it is what Anthony saw, or everything that the audience saw, should be the "memories" in his brain! In the midst of sobs, the caretaker gently patted his back, and the figure could not bear to look directly at him.
Anne chose a windowed room for her father in a nursing home, similar to his home in London, allowing him to stand by the window every day and connect the streetscapes and green spaces of his past life.
It seems that I am also looking forward to the day in the future, which will remind my father of all the good memories again.