Review: 'The Son,' despite its strong cast, is a willfully dreary piece of pandering Oscar bait

Sometimes you have to trust the system — and the system has rightfully rejected the Oscar-season pander-monster that is “The Son,” a pedigreed sadness machine that is as phony as can be.

Reading the names in the movie’s credits would make you think this is something special. It’s directed by French playwright-turned-filmmaker Florian Zeller, based on one of his plays, adapted for the screen by Zeller and Christopher Hampton. Those are the same people, and circumstances, that in 2020 produced “The Father,” the justly acclaimed drama about Alzheimer’s that won Oscars for Anthony Hopkins’ gut-wrenching performance and for Zeller and Hampton’s adapted screenplay.

The cast is loaded with dramatic heavy-hitters: Hugh Jackman and Vanessa Kirby, for starters, along with Oscar winners Laura Dern and, again, Hopkins — playing, despite the title’s suggestions of a sequel, a markedly different role than he did in “The Father.” 

What could go wrong? Plenty, as Zeller explores some serious topics — parental abandonment, teen depression and suicide — with none of the sincerity and sensitivity that “The Father” displayed.

Jackman plays Peter Miller, a successful New York lawyer with everything going for him: A beautiful young wife, Beth (Kirby), a new baby they share, and the potential for a high-powered job in a D.C. congressional office. That perfection gets upended when Peter’s first wife, Kate (Dern), calls up with a big problem: Their teen son, Nicholas (Zen McGrath), has been skipping school and showing signs of self-harm. Kate is at her wit’s end, and asks Peter to let Nicholas live with him for awhile.

Peter tries to connect with Nicholas with some old-school moves of guys hanging out and doing stuff. But Peter finds he’s ill-equipped for being father to a troubled teen — and the steps he attempts are too much in line with how his cold father (played by Hopkins) treated him.

All this might work in a stage play, but onscreen it dissolves into a hackneyed, overcooked melodrama in which the main characters each are given two emotional settings, and the audience has to guess which way the switch has been flipped. Is Peter a loving dad or a short-tempered one? Is Nicholas truly suicidal or just manipulative? Is Kate trying to be a good co-parent or is she secretly trying to win Peter back? Is Beth jealous of her stepson or rightly protective of her baby? The way Zeller leaves the options open feels like a writer playing a capricious God.

That said, the actors work to produce human-scaled performances — especially Dern and Kirby, as the mothers trying to protect their children. But there’s too much of a stacked deck in “The Son” to let the performances overcome Zeller’s shameless handling of the subject matter.

——

‘The Son’

★★

Opens Friday, January 20, in theaters. Rated PG-13 for mature thematic content involving suicide, and strong language. Running time: 123 minutes.