And When Did You Last See Your Father?


RUN TIME: 88 Minutes Actual film time: 83 minutes	AKA: When Did You Last See Your Father? - US & North America

FILMING LOCATIONS: Goodwood Estate, West Sussex, England, UK Chichester, West Sussex, England, UK Brighton, East Sussex, England, UK Lathkil Hotel/Pub, Over Haddon, Bakewell, Derbyshire, England, UK Cromford, Matlock, Derbyshire, England, UK Twickenham Film Studios, St. Margaret's, Twickenham, Middlesex, England, UK Snake Pass, Derbyshire, UK Liberal Club, Westminster, London, England, UK Petworth House & Park, Petworth, West Sussex, England, UK West Wittering Beach, Chichester, West Sussex, England, UK Weston, Somerset, England, UK

DIRECTOR: Anand Tucker	WRITER: Blake Morrison (novel), David Nicholls (screenplay)
PRODUCER: Lizzie Francke, Elizabeth Karlsen, Stephen Woolley	CINEMATOGRAPHER: Howard Atherton

CAST: Colin Firth... Blake Morrison Jim Broadbent... Dr. Arthur Morrison Juliet Stevenson... Kim (Agnes) Morrison Gina McKee... Kathy Morrison Matthew Beard... Teen Blake Morrison Carey Mulligan... Rachel Tom Clear... Mechanic Sarah Lancashire... Beaty Tilly Curtis... Josie Justin McDonald... Steve Elaine Cassidy... Sandra Claire Skinner... Gillian Tara Berwin... Young Gillian Robert Angell... Uncle Sam Graham Turner... The Undertaker Bradley Johnson... Blake Morrison at age 8 Blake Morrison... uncredited Rhiannon Howden... Aphra Morrison Elliot Avery... Seth Morrison	Production Companies Archer Street Productions Number 9 Films Ltd. [gb]/Audley Films EM Media FilmFour Intandem Films UK Film Council Father Features Bórd Scannán na hÉireann (The Irish Film Board) Distributors A-Film Distribution (Netherlands) (theatrical) Sony Pictures Classic (North, Central and South America) (all media) Buena Vista International (UK) (theatrical) Icon Film Distribution (Australia) (theatrical) MG Film (Croatia) (all media) Warner - Lusomundo (Portugal) (theatrical)

MUSIC: Barrington Pheloung Stars - The Magical Fascination My Infallible Dad What Do You Think? - A Love Theme No, It's Something A Childhood Search Casta Diva from Norma Intimate Memories Complex Memories Who Is My Dad? Childhood Wonders Searching For The Past Family Questions First Loves Andante from Keyboard Concert in G minor BWV 1058 Just Stop A Happy End Certain Beauty - A Fathers Love Adagio from Piano Trio in E flat major D, 897 Saying Goodbye The Catharsis And When Did You Last See Your Father? * Main Theme - Hope	Additional Music: Cold Cold Feeling Don't Ever Change I Ain't Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore I Can't Let Go I Yi Yi Yi Yi Like You Very Much I'm Gonna Tell Santa Claus On You Mayor of Simpleton One Fine Day Put A Little Love In Your Heart Winter Weather

Reviews

This film is a symphony for eyes. Years from now, it will be agreed that no one but Anand Tucker could have directed it; that no one but Jim Broadbent could have played Arthur and no one, but no one, could have played Blake, both young and old, as did Colin and Matthew Beard.

Arthur Morrison was a difficult man. Larger than life, he sucked the air out of any room he was in. Slightly dodgy, boisterous, dramatic, most likely unfaithful to his stoic wife Kim and a continuous embarrassment to his introspective and sensitive son. Yet despite his laundry list of character flaws, you also see Arthur’s humanity, through Jim Broadbent’s masterful portrayal of the man. Thanks to his handling of this artistic challenge you don’t completely hate Arthur.

Juliet Stevenson was amazing as Kim Morrison. A woman who had to come to terms with being married to a man that was seemingly oblivious of her humiliation by his behavior. However, don’t look for any martyrdom or hand-wringing; instead you will see a woman of quiet dignity and strength. While Arthur was off being Arthur, it was Kim that was the rock of the family, offering support and tenderness to her children, especially Blake.

Gina McKee was somewhat wasted as Kathy Morrison, Blake’s wife. But she got to lie in bed with Colin… twice!! So I don’t think she has anything to complain about. LOL

Matthew Beard is someone that bears watching in the future. During the Q&A, Jim Broadbent commented on his natural acting ability and I couldn’t agree more. Like Colin, he has the innate ability to convey pages of dialogue with one look or gesture. That is not something you can learn in Drama School, you either have the gift or you don’t. Anyone who is now raising teenagers or raised them in the past will recognize the eye-rolling frustration of youth that Matthew brings to the role. Matthew is able to deftly portray the frightening vulnerability of Blake as he realizes that his father is not a man he can connect with or be proud of and is uncertain if Arthur is at all proud of him. “I hate him”, is a refrain that we ourselves may have uttered toward our own fathers at some point during those confusing hormone driven teen years and one that Blake utters after he’s the unfortunate victim of one of Arthur’s misguided jokes. His anguish was palatable.

Fast forward and now Blake is married with a wife and family. The relationship between father and son is still strained. The mutual lack of understanding continues and now time is running out. We all understand that we will outlive our parents. Its how life operates and while we intellectually know this, having a date suddenly put before you is an emotional thunderbolt. While I could not argue with the literary beauty of Blake’s prose, seeing his desperate anguish on film through Colin’s eyes is wrenching, almost too painful to watch. Colin makes it so personal and private, yet I could not turn away. He was able to capture Blake’s dilemma of his needing to ask the questions that always haunted him and his fear of what those answers might be. Colin’s command of the understated was never more beautiful to watch.

There was only scene that I felt did not keep in line with the “truth” of Blake’s book. Yes, it's “that” scene. I felt the scene before it is misleading, so I suggest before you do see the film, you read the book to fully appreciate Blake’s motivations for “taking that bath”.

By the film’s end, I was crying like a baby and wanting to call my own Father. As I said, a beautiful, thoughtful, poignant visual melody that will stay with you forever. Don’t miss it!

Cindi - 13 September 2007

Website co-admin

attended two screenings at TIFF '07

Synopsis

Based on Blake Morrison’s best selling memoir, “And When Did You Last See Your Father?”, is ultimately a father son love story. From scholarly Blake’s fraught and some times humiliating teenage years growing up with a charismatic, overbearing and adulterous father; through to the ultimate grief of watching him die, as an adult and father himself, the story takes us on a heart-rending and often humorous journey in which Blake revisits his past, comes to terms with some difficult home truths and finally learns to accept that one’s parents are not always accountable to their children.

Plot Summary
And When Did You Last See Your Father? is Blake Morrison's moving and candid memoir of his father in the weeks leading up to his death. When Arthur Morrison was diagnosed with terminal cancer he had only a few weeks left to live. Morrison traveled to Yorkshire to stay with his mother in the village where he grew up. He visited his father at the hospital where he had spent so much time with his own patients as a GP. As his father's condition worsened Morrison contemplated their shared experiences, the intimacies and the irritations of their relationship. After his father's death Morrison questions the nature of the bond between them, articulately expressing the contradictions, frustrations, love and loss bound into the complicated relationships which most of us have with our parents as we grow up.

Telluride Film Program Synopsis

Blake is a successful, middle-aged writer who’s happily married with children. The one thing in his life that he can’t get right is his damaged relationship with his father Arthur, a boisterous, devious egotist who sucks up the air in every room he enters. Working from David Nicholl’s adaptation of poet-novelist Blake Morrison’s memoir, Anand Tucker (HILARY AND JACKIE, SHOPGIRL) choreographs this tragicomic pas de deux of frustration, misunderstanding and perpetual grievance with pitchperfect precision. Jim Broadbent demonstrates his consummate skill in conveying the monstrous side of Arthur’s charm. But it’s the haunted, anguished tenderness of Blake, as played by Colin Firth in what’s easily the finest role of his career, that makes FATHER so riveting. Tucker and his cast have created the rare, jewel-like “small” film that you wouldn’t want one ounce or inch bigger.

Toronto Film Festival Film Program Review

A deeply affecting story about the challenges of coming to terms with the past lives and old sins of our parents, When Did You Last See Your Father? shows filmmaker Anand Tucker revisiting rich and familiar themes. After the infinitely charming romance of Shopgirl, the versatile director’s new film marks a return to the moving territory of the award-winning Hilary and Jackie. Like the title figures of his earlier work, the characters in When Did You Last See Your Father? carry their intense emotions deep beneath a deceptively inert surface. His tale of Blake, an introverted man (a wonderfully restrained performance by Colin Firth, who also appears in Then She Found Me) attempting to make peace with his overbearing, egotistical father when the latter is struck down by illness is at once heart-rending and beautiful.

As a sensitive eight-year-old in the tightlipped England of the fifties, Blake saw his father, Arthur (Jim Broadbent), as something of an ogre. In a series of flashbacks, Arthur is revealed to be a self-centered man who cares nothing for what people think of him and who jumps at the slightest chance of getting something for nothing. Blake suffers through awkward camping trips and irritating family holidays, never once receiving a word of praise from his father. Dominated by Arthur’s personality throughout his life, Blake gradually resigns himself to their unequal relationship as he gets older.

When his father falls terminally ill, the adult Blake is compelled to confront the difficult history they share, which has prevented any meaningful connection between the two men. At the same time, Blake comes to understand that in his own clumsy and offensive way, Arthur was doing his best to show his son he loved him. As Arthur’s health deteriorates – a process shown with unflinching, devastating realism – Blake struggles to mend the wounds of the past. When Did You Last See Your Father? avoids sentimentality in favour of a hard-hitting meditation on regret and the uneasy but powerful bond between fathers and sons.

Piers Handling

Arthur Morrison and his wife Kim are both GPs based in the same medical practice in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales. They have two children, Gillian and her older brother Blake – the protagonist of the story and today an established author. Blake’s story jumps between childhood and teenage memories, and the present day, which sees him at 40, married with two children, and dealing with the fact that his father is terminally ill.
The film opens with a humorous flashback to a summer bank holiday family trip in the late 1950s. Blake is 8 years old and we see him and the rest of the family dying with embarrassment as Arthur hits the hard shoulder to skip a long queue of traffic at a car racing event. He proceeds to charm his way in to the private members car park.
This is the first of many flashbacks that convey Arthur’s bluff ways and the pride he takes in his money-saving, time-saving minor duplicities. Some of these childhood episodes include Auntie Beatty and her daughter Josie.
It becomes clear that Beatty and Arthur are more than friends and that Josie could even be Arthur’s child. Adult Blake strives and fails to find the truth about Josie but it adds to the problematic relationship between father and son as well as providing an insight to the parameters of his father’s marriage – Kim knows about Beatty and never reacts.
To the present day and Arthur’s ways haven’t changed over the years, he is indignant that Blake has hired a van to move house with his family when he could have used his own mobile home for the job. It’s clear that Arthur still dominates his son, to both Blake’s resignation and his wife’s annoyance. However, Blake’s wife and children barely feature in this story.
We track Blake on his increasingly frequent trips north from his London home to visit his ailing yet ebullient father and to support his mother – the ever adoring wife.
The essence of this father/son relationship is further explained through flashbacks to Blake’s teens – a skiing trip, a fumbled affair with the au pair – where the awkward and introverted Blake is constantly crushed by his father’s flirtatious ways and need to be the centre of attention.
These memories are interspersed with tender, heart-rending and often uncomfortably graphic scenes of Arthur’s decline and submission to the cancer that is killing him.
Arthur’s battle with his failing health is paralleled by Blake’s struggle to come to terms with his relationship with his father.

British writer Morrison pens a reflective and humorous tribute to his late father, a genial general practitioner with a kind heart, a roving eye, a quick wit, and a penchant for minor duplicities. Morrison deftly juxtaposes robust childhood memories with poignant scenes of his elderly father's rapid decline in health, producing a vivid dual portrait of a man as viewed through the eyes, the mind, and the heart of both a child and an adult. Dr. Morrison's multiple faults and failings are examined as candidly as his virtues, allowing the author to fully explore and analyze the complex nature of the ties that inextricably bind a son to his father throughout the entire course of his life. A tender and therapeutic memoir designed to appeal to anyone who has ever been both enthralled and exasperated by a parent. Margaret Flanagan

And when did you last see your father? When did you? Was it last weekend or last Christmas? Was it before or after he exhaled his last breath? When was he able to recognize you, or complete a task (changing a light bulb, fixing your bookshelves) without having to be helped himself? And was it him really, in the fullness of his being - or was it a version of him, shaped by your own expectations and disappointments? Blake Morrison's subject is universal: the life and death of a parent, a father at once beloved and exasperating, competent and inept, charming and infuriating, domineering and terribly vulnerable. But this memoir's central concern is identity. In reading about Dr. Arthur Morrison, we ask ourselves the same searching questions that Blake Morrison poses. Can we ever see our parents as themselves? Or are they forever defined by the lens of a child's or a teenager's eyes? What are the secrets of their lives, and why do they spare us that knowledge? How can we ever know our fathers in their other incarnations - as friends, as husbands and lovers, as employees? And when they die, what do they take with them that cannot be recovered or inherited?