{"id":19516,"date":"2023-01-19T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-19T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=19516"},"modified":"2023-01-16T10:45:14","modified_gmt":"2023-01-16T18:45:14","slug":"review-the-son","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/review-the-son\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Son<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cHe needs you, Peter,\u201d his ex-wife tells him. \u201cYou can\u2019t just abandon him.\u201d The words are chosen carefully, for maximum effect; Peter (Hugh Jackman) did, in fact, abandon his ex-wife Kate (Laura Dern) and their teenage son Nicholas (Zen McGrath). Now he has a new wife, Beth (Vanessa Kirby), and a new baby. But Nicholas hasn\u2019t been to school in almost a month, and Kate can\u2019t reach him. \u201cI don\u2019t understand where this sadness comes from,\u201d she says. \u201cWell, he\u2019s a teenager,\u201d Peter replies, which doesn\u2019t quite explain it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These four people are the central characters of The Son<\/em>, the new film from Florian Zeller, who also wrote and directed The Father <\/em>two years ago (insert The Holy Spirit<\/em> joke here). Early on, it appears that Nicholas is the title character; he suffers from acute depression, and Peter doesn\u2019t have much more luck than Kate, at least initially; he gives him platitudes, and warnings of the consequences of not going to school, and plays the role of the stern father. \u201cI can\u2019t deal with any of it,\u201d Nicholas explains. \u201cI want something to change, but I don\u2019t know what.\u201d Maybe the change is his surroundings, so he goes to live with Peter and Beth and the new baby for a while \u2013 which, understandably, creates some tension between husband and wife, as well as stepmother and stepson. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the more time we spend with these characters, the more we understand that the key to Peter\u2019s strained relationship with his son is his own relationship with his father (played by The Father<\/em> star Anthony Hopkins, in one brief and chilling scene). The stilted formality of their interactions is painful; the way Peter\u2019s father laughs, outright, at his son\u2019s attempt at \u201cmoral superiority\u201d is worse. He clocks him, perhaps accurately, for announcing himself as a better father than his own, but privately, particularly in this challenging time, he realizes he\u2019s becoming the father he always hated.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n


Peter is not an easy role, and Jackman occasionally delivers a false beat or awkward line reading. But his understanding of the character is sharp as a tack; he\u2019s spent, it seems, much of his life keeping himself at a safe, optimistic distance (\u201cEverything will be fine,\u201d he keeps insisting), and when that doesn\u2019t work, he embarks on poorly calculated bouts of tough love and hard-edged disciplinarian aggression. It\u2019s not easy to put across desperation as a character without seeming desperate as an actor, but Jackman does it, and he has one moment here, explaining a dire turn of events to his ex-wife and absolutely falling apart, that is heart-wrenching.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zeller works in a cool, sleek style, dwelling on the shiny surfaces and upscale lives of his protagonists, as they become aware that there are certain problems you cannot just throw money at. \u201cI try every day with all my strength,\u201d Nicholas struggles to explain. \u201cI\u2019m in pain all the time. And I\u2019m tired, I\u2019m tired of being in pain.\u201d He states this flatly, simply, and most of the big moments in The Son<\/em> are like that; this is a low-volume movie, where voices are rarely raised, and everyone tries to accommodate, to not make a big deal. (It rings false only when bucking that instinct \u2013 there\u2019s one awful moment where Nicholas overhears a conversation that it\u2019s hard to believe his father and stepmother would have, right then and there).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Son <\/em>isn\u2019t as innovative as The Father<\/em>, which ingeniously replicated the disassociation and confusion of its protagonist by telling its story from his perspective. But Zellner effectively uses sound and image to convey the depths of his despair, the low rumbling of depression in all of his interactions, and Hans Zimmer\u2019s score is subtle and effective. One should be clear: this is a difficult film, about difficult subjects, and even its short-lived bursts of happiness and connection mostly serve to remind us how quickly those moments can end. \"\"\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

B<\/strong><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Florian Zeller’s follow-up to ‘The Father’ falls far short of that movie’s greatness, but offers up a tough, uncompromising story of a family in crisis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":19518,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[340],"tags":[1098],"class_list":["post-19516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-movie-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}