Saved by Jim

Although And When Did You Last See Your Father? is probably not a great work of cinema, and may not even be a work of cinema at all — it could easily be 90 minutes of above-par Sunday night telly — it is touching and the cast are wonderful. That Jim Broadbent, can he do anything wrong? I don’t think so. I think he could recite the menu from Pizza Hut and somehow make it not just a must-see event, but poignant, too. How does he do that? I have no idea, as I know little about anything, but I do know this: Jim Broadbent saves this film, if it is a film, from what could have so easily been mush and sentimentality at every turn.

And When…is, of course, based on writer Blake Morrison’s 1993 best-selling memoir dealing with the experience of watching his father, Arthur Morrison, die of cancer, and his desperate attempts in those very last days to address a lifetime of conflicting emotions. By all accounts, Arthur, a GP in the Yorkshire Dales, was not a discreet dad given to putting his kids’ needs first. He was a loud, boisterous, blustering often embarrassing man with a gift for hogging the limelight, doing down his son and cheating on Blake’s mother with Aunt Beaty, a ‘family friend’.

The film opens, as does the book, which I think I’ve read (or maybe I haven’t; I can’t remember what I have and haven’t anymore), in the late 1980s with Blake (Colin Firth) as a husband and father himself, as well as a successful novelist. There is a blissful scene, beautifully summing up the father–son relationship, at a book awards ceremony which Blake has invited Arthur to, and then spots across the room ‘telling Salman Rushdie how it is done’.