A film for fans of literary memoirs

Arthur (Jim Broadbent) and his son Blake (Colin Firth) share an agreeable
moment in When Did You Last See Your Father?
Arthur (Jim Broadbent) and his son Blake (Colin Firth) share an agreeable moment in When Did You Last See Your Father?

Unfailingly intelligent and admirably unsentimental, "When Did You Last See Your Father?" is a movie for people who take pleasure in the textures and sidelong insights of literary memoir, an introspective art practiced by the sort of people who generally fail to register on screen, according to Philip Martin's review in Friday's MovieStyle section.

Movie

When Did You Last See Your Father? ******** 1/2

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A poet (Colin Firth) comes to grips with the terminal illness of his father (Jim Broadbent) through memories of everything funny, embarrassing and upsetting about his childhood. With Juliet Stevenson, Matthew Beard, Gina McKee; directed by Anand Tucker. PG-13 for sexual content, language

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The film, opening Friday at Little Rock's Market Street Cinema, is aimed at those who like stories told in ways that don't naturally translate to film, for whom the scuff and nape of language might not only be sufficient but the entire point. It is not entirely successful, for it is slow and at times indirect to the point of being obtuse, but it will remind you of the way things are remembered. It feels like a memory of a dream, a little unreliable and out of focus, underpinned by uneasy, vague feelings of guilt and shame.

One is tempted to go on because "When Did You Last See Your Father?" does not lend itself to conventional encapsulation. To say it is about dying old reprobate Arthur (remarkably played by Jim Broadbent) and his relationship with his bookish and preening writer son Blake (Colin Firth as an adult in 1989 and the sensational Matthew Beard as an adolescent in flashback) is to miss the point.

"When Did You Last See Your Father?" is at least as much about how and why we choose to remember what we remember and what we would like to forge as it is a story of a man coming to grips with the simple flawed humanity of his blowhard physician father, a graceless philanderer and opportunist who was forever embarrassing his sensitive son.

Read tomorrow's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.

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