Toronto and the UK. And When Did You Last See Your Father?

"Recently, I attended a private screening of And When Did You Last See Your Father?, the film based on the eponymous memoir by Blake Morrison. Blake, as it happened, was sitting in my clear view two rows in front." And so begins Tim Lott's piece for the Guardian on writers "trying to take their personal lives and make them directly into art." More - much more - from Morrison himself in the Review.

Updated through 10/7.

"The book has now passed into the reliable hands of screenwriter David Nicholls and director Anand Tucker, who between them have finessed Morrison's pained intimacies into a deeply affectionate film," writes Anthony Quinn in the Independent.

For the Evening Standard's Derek Malcolm, the "one huge advantage" this film's got is "the acting. Of a particularly British kind, it's often understated and never forced but also wonderfully expressive without ever pushing what is a quietly observed drama into sentimental melodrama." The cast features Jim Broadbent, Colin Firth, Matthew Beard, Juliet Stevenson and Sarah Lancashire.

"The title has nothing to do with WF Yeames's painting; it is about the agony of trying to remember a dead father, really remember the last time he was properly himself, before the spores of illness invaded his personality and the insidious, gradual process of dying began." And the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw finds it "an intelligent and heartfelt film."

"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," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi.

Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times: "Someone should have held down the composer, Barrington Pheloung, and hissed in his ear: 'Less is more.' But the acting is uniformly good and the death scene magicks all the right sniffles from the audience."

Tim Teeman talks with Firth for the London Times.

Update, 10/7: For the Observer's Philip French, the film conjures more than a few memories since Morrison was once that paper's literary editor: "Sensitively edited by Trevor Waite, the film alternates subtly, seamlessly between past and present and constantly uses mirrors to suggest the different meanings of reflection, of seeing things through a glass darkly, of viewing events from different angles. It touches movingly, enlighteningly on universal matters we can all identify with, and it does so without ever getting maudlin or sentimental."

Posted by dwhudson at October 6, 2007 4:28 AM