The Son
Directed by Florian Zeller
Running time: 2hr3 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Hugh Jackman stars in The Son
Halfway through The Son, amid a quagmire of familial hostilities and plunging personal despair on multiple sides, Hugh Jackman does a little dance. Someone flips Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual” onto the speakers, and the star’s famously supple hips — after some brief, half-hearted protesting on his part — start to shimmy. Then his arms loosen too, waving in disco-tastic formation, as his feet shuffle lithely across the hardwood floors of his character’s handsome, moneyed Manhattan loft.
French playwright Florian Zeller’s Oscar-winning first feature, The Father, established him as the kind of stern, pensive filmmaker from whom you wouldn’t expect a momentary dance break, and The Son — not a sequel, but certainly a companion piece — is cut from the same sober, shadowed cloth. But then Jackman, unexpectedly but effectively cast as a chilly, clammed-up workaholic lawyer who has let his responsibilities as a husband and father go drastically to seed, is already so far outside his star persona that a little Tom Jones boogie feels like a concession to him. Let the man dance, just for a minute, because things are going to get a lot tougher from here.
Peter (Jackman) has all the required markers of a good, upstanding, successful life: that gorgeous apartment is shared with his elegant wife Beth (Vanessa Kirby) and their adorable newborn son. They must both accept what limited time he can extract for them from an A-league career on the verge of transitioning into high-powered Washington politics. Except it’s his second time trying to pull off that balance. Largely edited out of that unblemished biography are his wounded, anxious ex-wife Kate (Lauren Dern) and their 17-year-old son Nicholas (Zen McGrath), who has grown from an apple-cheeked trophy toddler into a surly, self-harming adolescent whose mental health is in a severe downward spiral. That’s not nearly so pretty.
“Life is weighing me down,” Nicholas admits to his dad, who was hoping for more of a quick-fix pep talk: Peter lives his life trying to find ways to be there for people without actually having to be around them. (A brilliant, scarringly cold cameo from Anthony Hopkins as Peter’s own father makes quite clear the roots of his parenting impulses.) Nicholas isn’t coy with his warning signs, yet still Peter assumes that sensible, functional decorum will eventually prevail, as it did for him.
That dorky dad-dance, then, isn’t just a welcome tonal break in a clenched, discomfiting film — even a writer as serious as Zeller knows that burdened lives still feature sporadic disruptions of joy — but an exaggerated demonstration of the okay-ness that Peter has spent a lifetime perfecting, that his son hasn’t yet learned to feign.
One of Hollywood’s most bluff, affable leading men, Jackman here excels in a role gradually and cruelly stripped of its glibness; the remarkable McGrath, taut and stifled and unsettled in his skin, isn’t just his opposite number, but his suppressed mirror image. As in The Father, the missed cues, tacit accusations and lost time of parent-child relationships are explored here with a relentless high-stakes precision that takes The Son into psychological thriller territory — pained with tension, though perhaps suspenseful only to someone as bad at reading people as Peter is.
THE SON (2022) Written by Christopher Hampton, Florian Zeller | Shot by Ben Smithard | Edited by Yorgos Lamprinos
Screened in Competition at the 79th Venice Film Festival