This week I'm looking at some storytelling takeaways from the 2021 Oscar Nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Have you seen THE FATHER? If you haven't, please go watch it before reading this.
(I realize it sounds like I'm talking about a Marvel TV show rather than the story of an old man with dementia and the daughter trying to figure out what to do with him. But trust me, though it has no capes or tights, this isn't a movie you want spoiled.)
I think I might have mentioned a couple months ago that I recently got to interview a comic book writer who was given the opportunity early in his career to work on a book with a Major Comic Book Writing Genius. Mostly his job was to do the dialogue pass, while the MCBWG did plots and the final pass.
But every once in a while my friend The Then Newbie got the chance to actually do the plots and dialogue all himself. And he found it a frustrating experience. Even when he felt like his storytelling was good, it all still seemed grossly inadequate to what the MCBWG was accomplishing in other issues.
For the longest time, he couldn't figure out why that was. Then it dawned on him: In the issues that he got to write, he was telling his stories fine, but the camera was in a sense always neutral. The story was in effect just the series of things that passed "onscreen".
Meanwhile, when the MCBWG wrote, events never "just happened". He always had a specific and unusual angle on them.
Stories of people struggling with dementia are pretty familiar at this point. In fact there's another film on the topic out right now, SUPERNOVA, which stars Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth as a married couple and is absolutely wonderful.
What makes THE FATHER stand out is its point of view. Rather than showing us a man struggling with dementia, writers Florian Zeller--who also wrote the play--and Christopher Hampton bring us into that experience in a radical way.
After taking a good long time to set up our main characters Anthony and Anne and their conflict --he's starting to lose it and keeps driving away caretakers; she's moving to Paris to be with this man she met--we suddenly introduce Paul, who has somehow broken into Anthony's house and won't leave and what is his game.
But then it turns out it's not Anthony's house, it's Paul's, and he's married to Anne, oh and by the way she's played by a completely different person now, and that whole first scene never happened. Or did it?
And before we can get any kind of answers about any of that the writers lead down us this rabbit hole of a day in which each scene makes sense on its own, but then it turns out they're happening out of order, then start to overlap upon themselves, and finally culminate in that insane dining room Möbius strip moment where the scene somehow ends where it began.
So it's not just not the characters and events that are coming unglued, it's the passage of time itself.
And in the midst of all that we're also getting a few strange and nightmarish beats with Anne that make you wonder whether it might actually be that she's the one that's having the delusions, not her dad. (Those beats are really interesting to think about in terms of point of view: at every other point we experience what Anthony is experiencing. To add in these scenes is like giving us our own personal experience of dislocation and dementia.)
How do you tell a story? What THE FATHER and movies like it remind us is that there are many interesting ways beyond the default of letting the story "tell itself".
Takeaway Question: In my story are the scenes simply passing before us on screen? What is my point of view?
