The Good Father (1987)

Too much of everything

Memorable, crazy movie

Just perfect...

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

This is a very slow, dark, and unsatisfying story that meanders between a lonely man (Anthony Hopkins) dealing with his ex and child, his odd friendship with another man (Jim Broadbent), a love(less) affair, and shockingly violent fantasies.Hopkins and Broadbent are terrific as always, their faces revealing depths of agony, frustration, and confusion; but the story is limp. I suppose the writer is saying that life isn't always interesting nor does it always turn out the way we want and loose ends don't get tied up neatly or completely.This is a good one to see if you're a Hopkins fan, otherwise, skip it. I felt like I'd wasted my time with it.

Before Silence of the Lambs made him a "movie star," Anthony Hopkins turned in a number of intelligent and nuanced performances. The Good Father is one of them. For one thing, it is the only movie I know of that hints at the impulse to filicide, unwilled, by no means perverse, but nevertheless the acknowledgment that one's child has contributed to one's doom. It comes to Hopkins' character in dreams. They disturb him terribly. One should simply not feel like that.But in the picture's very last shot, a flashback, where Hopkins watches his wife stroke her swollen stomach with tears streaming from her eyes, it becomes clear that the child will become and has become the end of them. "You were the love of my life," he tells her after the child is born and they are separated.Paralelling his own situation is another Brit's. Hopkins takes up with a man who is distraught because his wife has left him (for another woman) and is planning to take their son. Hopkins' character supports and subsidizes his new friend in his efforts to beat this man's wife in court. The man wins, compromises out of court with his wife to see his son, and spurns Hopkins' purported help with contempt. Hopkins loses.A superb study of a rarely looked at human complexity.

This movie solidified why I like Anthony Hopkins so much. He is seething with such rage and horror. It amazes me that he can act like this, but in some movies he can be so calm, like another film that was released the same year this one was, 84 Charring Cross Road (costarring the great Anne Bancroft.) The reason I love The Good Father is because it's a very interesting story and it shows several talents that hadn't quite made it yet. Hopkins hadn't yet made The Silence of the Lambs. Jim Broadbent, who plays the man Hopkins' character is trying to help get his son back, hadn't won his Oscar for his role in Iris. Also Mike Newell, the director, hadn't made a name for himself either. After this film, he made Four Weddings and a Funeral. If you want to see a great drama with superb performances, watch this film. If you like Hopkins in anything, then definitely see this movie.

That's a quote from this caustic and funny dissection of sexual politics set in south London, which sadly and unfairly has dropped from view. Sharply directed by Mike Newell whose other credits include 'Four weddings' and the disturbing 'Awfully big adventure', it also boasts a storming script by the writer of 'Dangerous Liasons'. Hopkins is an instinctive actor and that can lead to some scenery chewing but the anger in this film is something you feel he relates to and it's an uncomfortably authentic performance. TGF suffers from a lack of bucks but is very tightly edited and fastly paced. There is not a dull moment. Hopkins plays Bill Hooper, an over-the-hill ad exec whose embittered experiences of a failed relationship and sixties radicalism spurs him into helping an impoverished school teacher he meets at a party gain custody of his son from his lesbian wife in a way that is cruel and underhand but within the law. The custody case which Hooper bank roles is handled by the cynical and obnoxious ex-public school boy Mark Varda, expertly played by Simon Callow. Varda piquantly observes that Hooper is acting out his anger vicariously through the teacher, although he states that in his experience it's usually a women that's the crony, giving an extra ironic slant to the story. Also involved in the case is an old friend of Hooper's called Jane Powell, who once wore a radical feminist tea-shirt saying, 'all men are rapists', but as a barrister she is obliged to defer to the men in court to protect her career. Her fury with Hooper's vindictive interference in her client's case and her icy glaring at him from the bench are some of the film's funniest moments.Hooper's relationship with his estranged girlfriend turns out to be less bitter, and although they are unable to repair their relationship, an understanding is reached. There are many twists and turns in the teacher's custody case that results in a pyrric victory for both men. When the men decide to part company, the sadness of their involvement yields a great moment from Hopkins as he stares into an empty void filled with a bittersweet truth. The film's only unrealistic scenes involve Hooper's contrived and unlikely affair with a young women which seems a device to contrast the female mores of today and their bemusements with the frustrated and unresolved battles of the older generation. The real reasons for Hooper's failure and his nightmares involving his son are revealed in an unexpected denouement.This film has a poignant ending of personal estrangement and disillusion but don't let that put you off, it's gripping and thought provoking throughout.