Producers: Joanna Laurie, Iain Canning, Emile Sherman, Florian Zeller and Christophe Spadone   Director: Florian Zeller   Screenplay: Florian Zeller and Christopher Hampton   Cast: Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, Zen McGrath, Anthony Hopkins, George Cobell, Hugh Quarshie and Gretchen Egolf    Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Grade: C

Florian Zeller’s “The Father,” a brilliant depiction of an elderly man’s descent into dementia, won accolades in 2020, including an Oscar for Anthony Hopkins that surprised many who assumed the award would go posthumously to Chadwick Boseman for “Black Panther.”  Hopkins takes a small but crucial role in Zeller’s follow-up “The Son,” also based on a play of his that he and Christopher Hampton have adapted for the screen, but the starring role in the story of a man’s desperate attempt to deal with his teen son’s psychological deterioration is taken by Hugh Jackman, who gives a powerful, committed performance that, unfortunately, can’t overcome the piece’s melodramatic arc and a weak turn by Zen McGrath as the troubled boy.

Peter Miller (Jackman) is a successful lawyer whose second wife Beth (Vanessa Kirby) has just given birth to their son.  He’s also considering a position in a political campaign that would bring him the Washington connections he aspires to.  His plans are interrupted, however, by a visit from his former wife Kate (Laura Dern, terrific) who tells him that their son, seventeen-year old Nicholas (McGrath) has been skipping school and is descending into a place of psychological darkness that frightens her.  Peter, who has fond memories of the cherubic tyke (played in flashbacks by George Cobell) he taught to swim on a long-ago vacation, not only agrees to talk with the boy, but when Nicholas asks to come and live with him, Beth and his new half-brother, agrees.

At first things appear, at least to Peter, to be going well.  Nicholas is enrolled at a new school, and claims to be assimilating nicely.  There are even moments of apparent familial happiness, as when Beth encourages Peter to show off his old dance moves and Nicholas joins in their exuberance.

But the optimism is misplaced.  Nicholas has been ditching school since his first day with Peter, taking long, desultory walks instead, and has been cutting himself as a way of dealing with the pain of his depression.  Beth, like Kate before her, is growing concerned about what the boy might do, especially since she must deal with him during the time that Peter is away at work; and she’s understandably worried about the infant who is her primary responsibility.  A psychiatrist (Gretchen Egolf) is consulted, but eventually Nicholas’ suicidal tendencies require a stay in a psych ward where a doctor (Hugh Quarshie) recommends a longer term of confinement.  Nicholas, however, claims to be better and begs to come home.  What follows won’t be revealed here, but suffice it to say that given what’s occurred before—including one improbable detail—the outcome is unsurprising.  Yet Zeller can’t resist a particularly unwise theatrical trick to unsettle us before the close.

The play on which the film is based, which premiered in 2018, was the third in a trilogy of domestic dramas by Zeller; though not connected in terms of narrative, they certainly act as a unit.  The first, “The Mother,” about a middle-aged woman’s slide into manic depression after her children leave and she thinks her husband unfaithful, appeared in 2010, and “The Father” in 2012.  Both were told from the perspective of their title characters, so at first “The Son,” from 2018, might seem to depart from the pattern: the story is presented not from Nicholas’s point of view, after all, but Peter’s.  In fact, Nicholas is rather a peripheral figure—the one to whom the others react, rather than the protagonist.  And that’s not merely because McGrath isn’t a developed enough actor to give him much nuance (his main way of showing the character’s depressive state is to bite his fingernails).

On reflection, however, the title might seem appropriate, because Peter is not just father to Nicholas, but the son of Anthony (Hopkins), a Washington power broker whom he visits in a single scene for lunch.  Anthony was by all accounts an absent, uncaring father—bringing the picture to sudden life Hopkins endows him with a dismissive, almost sneering air, whose acerbic advice to Peter when he describes having felt abandoned as a child is simply to “get over it.”  Now Peter is guilt-stricken over the thought that he might have been as bad a father to Nicholas as Anthony was to him, repeating the old man’s mistakes by choosing to leave Kate for a younger woman and forcing Nicholas to fend for himself with his feelings of abandonment.  In this way the title of “The Son” can be seen as fitting, though not in quite the same way as those of the previous two plays in Zeller’s canon: Peter is the abandoned son who has become, in his eyes, a failed father to his own boy.

The film is handsomely produced, with a sleek production design by Simon Bowles and crisp cinematography by Ben Smithard that give the visuals a slightly antiseptic feel, apt editing by Yorgos Lamprinos and a suitably morose score by Hans Zimmer.   

But professional sheen is no compensation for a failure to connect viscerally with the viewer. One might compare “The Son” to two films from 2018 that in some ways share its themes.  One was “Ben’s Back,” in which a drug addict son returns home to seek his mother’s help, and the other “Beautiful Boy,” in which a father vainly struggles to save his son, who’s succumbing to addiction.  Each had problems, but in both the young actor playing the troubled son (Lucas Hedges in the first, Timothée Chalamet in the second) made a stronger impression than McGrath does.  Here despite committed work from Dern and Kirby, and in that shattering single scene from Hopkins, McGrath’s pallid presence means that Jackman must largely carry things by himself, and while he gives what’s probably his best performance since “Prisoners,” it’s not enough. This is ultimately a film that’s intended to be lacerating but instead just comes across as familiarly, and rather tepidly, melodramatic.

Producers: Scott Cooper, Christian Bale, Tyler Thompson and John Lesher   Director: Scott Cooper   Screenplay: Scott Cooper   Cast: Christian Bale, Harry Melling, Gillian Anderson, Lucy Boynton, Robert Duvall, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Toby Jones, Harry Lawtey, Simon McBurney, Hadley Robinson, Timothy Spall, Joey Brooks, Brennan Cook, Gideon Glick, Fred Hechinger, Matt Helm, Jack Irving, Steven Maier, Orlagh Cassidy, Scott Anderson, Mathias Goldstein and Charlie Tahan   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: C

Long on atmosphere but short on logic and excitement, Scott Cooper’s brooding adaptation of Louis Bayard’s 2003 historical mystery wastes an exceptional cast on a tale that grows increasingly silly as it plods to an exasperating conclusion.

The title “The Pale Blue Eye” is a phrase lifted from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and along with numerous other breadcrumbs those two anatomical references point to the solution of the convoluted whodunit in which Poe himself is a major character.  He plays second fiddle, however, to Augustus Landor (Christian Bale), the investigator at the center of the plot.

Landor was a celebrated detective in early nineteenth-century New York City, but retired into dour solitude in the Hudson Valley after the disappearance of his daughter Mattie (Hadley Robinson).  In 1830 he’s summoned by Captain Ethan Hitchcock (Simon McBurney) to meet with his superior, Brigadier General Sylvanus Thayer (Timothy Spall), the Superintendent of the nearby West Point Military Academy, and asked to investigate the death of a cadet named Fry (Steven Maier).  Fry was found hanging from a tree; even more gruesomely, his corpse was mutilated, the heart having been cut from his chest.  If not speedily resolved the case could be used by opponents of the academy to shut it down.

Landor, initially nonplussed by Hitchcock’s sudden arrival at his isolated cabin, agrees, and quickly embarrasses campus doctor Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones), who missed several clues during his examination of Fry’s body.  Over time, however, he wins approval from the nervous doctor and his oddly inquisitive wife (Gillian Anderson).  The couple’s children, on the other hand, are more enigmatic.  Their son Artemus (Harry Lawtey), also a West Point cadet, is an arrogant, preening type, while their lovely daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton) is reserved and fragile.

A heavy drinker, Landor frequents the tavern operated by Patsy (Charlotte Gainsbourg), sharing nights with her in bed.  It’s there that he meets Cadet Poe (Harry Melling), an effete outsider among his comrades, and recruits him as an assistant to collect information he’ll be better situated to learn than an outsider.  Poe insinuates himself into the clique headed by Artemus, and becomes infatuated with his sister who, it turns out, suffers from what’s called falling sickness.  He also reports to Landor on two of Artemus’ closest cadet friends, Ballinger (Fred Hechinger) and Stoddard (Joey Brooks).

They will be directly implicated in the turn the narrative takes into supernatural territory, as signs of Satanic ritual in Fry’s death induce Landor to consult an expert in the occult named Jean-Pepe (Robert Duvall, almost unrecognizable under ample face hair) and track down some genealogical clues that, along with a cryptic diary by Fry given him by the dead cadet’s mother (Orlagh Cassidy), leads to the apparent solution to not just Fry’s murder but a couple of others as well.  In the process Poe is barely saved from becoming yet another victim.

Yet with the mystery resolved, however implausibly, the script throws in a final curve as Poe reasons out that Landor’s unearthing of the complicated truth is still not complete.  Devotees of Agatha Christie as well as Poe, and particularly her groundbreaking novel “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” will detect her influence at work here—though in reverse, as it were.

“The Pale Blue Eye” is visually striking, with the grim fortress-like buildings and snowy landscapes confected by production designer Stefania Cella saturated in moody blues by cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi; Kasia Walicka-Maimone’s costumes likewise cast a spell, as does Howard Shore’s melancholic score.

But the film never comes alive, remaining throughout limp and inert.  That might seem appropriate given its gloomy subject matter, but Cooper’s penchant for solemn, stately staging, accentuated by Dylan Tichenor’s lethargic editing, drains any suspense from the narrative. 

It also seriously afflicts the performances.  Bale reverts to his grimmest, most mournful mode, rarely exhibiting the intellectual spark that’s supposed to mark Landor.  By contrast Melling, who looks a good deal like the young Poe, is all eager affectation, overdoing the theatrical gestures and vocalism of the character.  After a pose of arrogant prickliness at the start Jones recedes into glum diffidence, while Anderson and Lawtey are both highly mannered and Boynton all twittering frailty.  Spall and McBurney can muster nothing but officious military sneers, but Gainsbourg attempts to add some sultriness to her brief scenes, though without much success.  The less said about Duvall’s feeble cameo the better.

“The Pale Blue Eye” has been handsomely made, but the labored tale it spins probably works better on the page than it does in this ponderous adaptation.