Friday, June 27, 2008

The latest to have a crack at the toughest of all nuts -- the twisted thing between sons and dads -- is director Anand Tucker in "When Did You Last See Your Father?," which examines the subject with an A-level English cast including Jim Broadbent, Colin Firth and Juliet Stevenson.

The setting is Dad's last few days. But the real location of the film is son Blake's memory, which ranges over the years, recollecting moments of tenderness, rage, disappointment and fulfillment. There is also this double-headed fear: first that he is not the man his father was and second that he is too much the man his father was.

Drawn from a memoir by Blake Morrison, the screenplay's stream-of-consciousness quality replicates a mind in tumble as memories rush in and out. Quickly enough, however, it establishes its world: Morrison (Broadbent) was one of those hearty types, the self-decreed life of every party, a prosperous if culturally limited rural physician, un-self-aware, unironic and always busy.

The boy grew to be a man (Firth) almost the opposite: a professor and a prize-winning poet, even if neither of those destinies much impressed the practical gent dad was. ("It's only plastic," his father says, humorously but woundingly, when the son wins a literary prize.) As the boy grown to man contemplates the dying geezer in the sheets before him, he tries to reach his own summing up and, of course, can't: It's just too messy. Yet the movie is slick (the director loves mirrors!) and treacly and goes nowhere that hasn't been gone before.

-- Stephen Hunter

When Did You Last See Your Father? PG-13, 95 minutes Contains sexual situations, adult themes and brief strong language. Area theaters. When Did You Last See Your Father? PG-13, 95 minutes Contains sexual situations, adult themes and brief strong language. Area theaters.