Serious actors, lush Yorkshire countryside, musings on mortality and morality… this is undeniably a quality drama. Whether you’ll truly enjoy the experience or not is another matter though, and largely dependent on your age and your predilection towards slightly pompous Brits with daddy issues.
The performances are hard to fault. Colin Firth (Pride & Prejudice, Bridget Jones’s Diary) plays regretful adult son Blake Morrison with controlled pathos, while in the flashbacks newcomer Matthew Beard gives the teenage Blake a believably awkward geekiness, gradually morphing into simmering rage as his dad humiliates him in public time and time again. But the film really belongs to veteran Jim Broadbent (also Bridget Jones’s Diary), whose portrayal of the philandering father – getting up to all sorts of no good in his younger days and by stark contrast slowly wasting away from cancer in the ’80s scenes – is both funny and almost unbearably moving, with strong support from Juliet Stevenson (Truly, Madly, Deeply) as his silently suffering wife.
Things unfold rather like a mature English version of Tim Burton’s fantasy drama Big Fish, but this lacks the hope at the heart of that movie, leaving you instead with just a genuine feeling of sadness about the emotional estrangement of its main characters, and possibly the urge to hug the first old bloke you can find. It’s a heartfelt film, impeccably acted, but it’s not for everyone. And if you’ve experienced losing one of your own parents, make sure to take a box of tissues into the cinema – this will have you in floods.
