The initial situation is plenty serious. A friendship is struck up between two men of different social levels but otherwise in the same, or a similar, boat: each recently separated from his wife and small son. The one in the higher income bracket finds an outlet for his own sloshingly agitated emotions by egging on, and financially backing, the other, dolorously apathetic one, in a child-custody battle when the latter's ex-wife proposes to move to Australia with her current lesbian lover. More than just inherently serious, this situation is instantaneously interesting, until such time, anyhow, as something comes along to make it less so. The first and most persistent such thing is the installation of Anthony Hopkins in the role of the sloshingly agitated one. This actor is almost unfailingly, almost uninterruptedly fun. But hardly more than Marlon Brando, Wallace Beery, or Richard Barthelmess is he a man to be trusted to stay within the bounds of a real lifesized human being, unless it is a human being insufferably suffering from chronic histrionitis. For all of Hopkins's large-print emotions and too-free hand in coloring the events around him, he at least never angles for sympathy. The action unfolds in a cold, clinical atmosphere that immediately sets apart The Good Father as more "serious" than, say, the sentimental partisanship of Kramer vs. Kramer, whose situation it remotely resembles, or any of the topical TV movies-of-the-week that Kramer in turn resembled. Still, the staccato procession of scenes, short-winded, brusque, straight to the point, eyes to the front, does not allow the action to unfold in any direction but onward; and even subjects which we might have thought were well within the field of play -- the relationship between the two men, for instance, or that between either of the men and their sons, or that between anybody and anybody, really -- remain sketchy and unshaded, so that we never quite descend from the generic to the specific. In that way at least, The Good Father is somewhat uncomfortably reminiscent of the topical TV dramas it is otherwise so much more serious than: more topical, that is, than actually dramatic. With Jim Broadbent, Harriet Walter, and Simon Callow; directed by Mike Newell. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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