When Did You Last See Your Father?

Ella Taylor in the Voice: "Directed by Anand Tucker with the same intelligent tact he brought to Hilary and Jackie, and cleanly adapted by David Nicholls from a brutally frank memoir by British writer Blake Morrison, this minor pleasure of a drama about an aggrieved son (Colin Firth in the Blake role) re-evaluating his relationship with his cantankerous old sod of a dying father (Jim Broadbent as Arthur Morrison) is the kind of superior middlebrow filmmaking at which the Brits excel."

When Did You Last See Your Father? "isn't a groundbreaking work; just a smartly played story, enlivened by drama and spiked with passion, the very thing that thinking audiences pine for, especially during the summer spectacle season when theaters are clogged with sticky kids' stuff and television reruns," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

Updated through 6/8.

"If ever a film was placed in the hands of the wrong director, it's When Did You Last See Your Father?," argues S James Snyder in the New York Sun. Tucker "bathes his new film in the same pixie dust and pageantry that made Shopgirl a memorable, modern-day fairy tale. But given the nature of the Blake Morrison memoir upon which this movie is based, which is chiefly about wounded hearts and the clouded nostalgia of family (a far cry from the themes of love and life in Los Angeles in Shopgirl), Mr Tucker's fairy-tale flair misses the mark by a wide margin."

"Actors of the caliber of Firth and Broadbent are going to do effective work even under the worst of circumstances," writes Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times. "It is difficult not to feel a bit choked up as the film builds toward its inevitable finale, but then Tucker pushes things one grand sweeping shot too far, forcefully on-the-nose rather than subtly oblique."

"There's another film here about the death of an older England," suggests Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine. "Sadly, that film surfaces rarely and briefly. Instead, things devolve into patented tear-jerking, with Tucker wearing a few tricks really, really thin."

It "fully qualifies as what film historian Raymond Durgnat once designated as a 'male weepie,'" notes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer.

"While his staging can sometimes feel overly posed, Tucker elegantly lets past and present rhyme against one another, particularly in a long, lyrical passage covering a father-son road trip," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "Trouble only really sets in as the film starts to wind down and struggles to tie all those observations together a little too neatly. It's too true to life not to resist an easy conclusion."

"[T]hanks to Tucker's confident visual style, Nichols's seamless transitioning between past and present and an Academy Award-worthy performance by Jim Broadbent, this plotless motion picture with only the vaguest of a narrative arc proves a powerful experience," argues Robert Levin at cinemattraction

Matthew DeBord profiles Broadbent for the Los Angeles Times.

Earlier: Reviews from Toronto and the UK.

Update, 6/8: "At once over-reliant on the visual cliches of its genre (oversaturated light for outdoor scenes, metaphor-reflecting mirrors for indoor ones, slow-motion everywhere) and thoroughly unabashed in juxtaposing the gravity of mortality with the uncouth avenues of expression people take to get through it, the film oscillates wildly between middlebrow preciousness and a genuinely messy understanding of what could very well have been in other hands by-the-numbers Oedipal angst," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE.

Posted by dwhudson at June 6, 2008 6:56 AM