The film & Sons, in which a patriarch summons his estranged sons to let them in on a secret, has a stellar cast: Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton, Dominic West (briefly), Johnny Flynn, George MacKay, Noah Jupe. It can’t possibly fail, you might reasonably think. But when I heard my companion snoring at around the midway mark, I can’t say I didn’t feel a little jealous. This is not a family you’d wish to spend any time with. If they ever ask you for Christmas, say you’re away.
It sounds juicy on paper, as you’ll see. Nighy is Andrew Dyer, a famous literary novelist who, J.D. Salinger-style, is now a recluse and hasn’t written anything for 20 years. Nighy is practically unrecognisable, having traded his usual Savile Row dapperness for unkempt, straggly hair and an equally unkempt, straggly beard which looks as if it might have yesterday’s soup in it. (I personally prefer the recognisable Nighy.) Addicted to his ‘pills’ and an alcoholic, he lives in a Georgian country pile where he boozes, rages, listens to loud jazz while curled up in his bedroom study from which he rarely strays. He lives with his housekeeper, the remarkably long-suffering Gerde (Anna Geislerova), and his youngest son, 17-year-old Andy (Jupe), who is the result of the affair that destroyed his marriage to Isabel (Staunton). That’s what we are led to believe, and what his two adult sons (by Isobel) believe, but is this the truth? More than that I can’t say.
When I heard my companion snoring at around the midway mark, I can’t say I didn’t feel a little jealous
Dyer is convinced that he is dying so summons his older boys. They are Richard (Flynn), a recovering addict who, unbeknown to his father, has written a screenplay based on his most famous book, and Jamie (MacKay), who makes documentaries ‘about people’s suffering’, and is clearly a riot (not). Actually, the Jamie character is so underwritten that he could have been excised entirely. At the end of the first act their father lets them in on the Big Secret that concerns Andy. It’s a twist – I can’t say more – that is both implausible and never adequately explored.
There’s a moral dimension that’s left untouched. Deeper questions about regret, mortality, legacy are skipped over. Plus the twist makes little difference to what happens afterwards. They still just confront each other angrily while Dyer veers from self-pity to cruelty and back to self-pity. Staunton eventually brings some quiet heft and emotion but it’s too little too late.
Director Pablo Trapero fails to breathe any life into proceedings, while the sluggish script (by Trapero and Sarah Polley) fails to get under the skin of the characters or give us any reason to care. I couldn’t work out what these characters might even want. There are other missteps: a later revelation that’s more intriguing than the Big Secret but gets virtually no screen time. And West, who (briefly) appears as a Hollywood producer, might as well have been airlifted in from another film, he’s so cartoonish. And to discover exactly why Gerde is so long-suffering, you would have to turn to David Gilbert’s book, on which the film is based.
The result is stilted, laborious, nebulous and, while the performances are all committed, and watching Nighy and Staunton in anything will never exactly be time wasted, I couldn’t buy any of it.
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