Shades 8 comments

By A.G. Harmon

Memory is shady, an aspect that only increases with time. At a distance, what we would hold onto, what we would pull into the light, slips from us like smoke through the fingers. In the end, we’re left with shuttering pictures rather than fluid narratives, a stutter-and-stop nickelodeon rather than an arch of seamless progression, five acts and a clear denouement. So we have to make the best of these rough shards, pronounce what seems true of them and move on, accepting what we vaguely see now as the best catalog of what we truly saw then.

But occasionally, when things settle down—when the 401K isn’t crashing and the cryptic threats of utter ruin are held at bay—there’s the luxury of greater reflection. It may come on long car trips, or plane rides, or waits at the dentist’s office. At such times, we struggle against the truncated, long-seen pictures that our memory trots out for us, like a bad school yearbook; instead, we demand to see something more substantial from the riddled seasons of our youth.

Poet/novelist Blake Morrison attempted to reach past the conventional package of recollections for a real, honest memory of his father in his memoir, And When Did you Last See Your Father?, made into a film of the same title (minus the prefacing conjunction, for some reason). Morrison’s endeavor is all the more difficult because of his father’s last, overwhelming illness. Stricken by a debilitating cancer, the man is reduced by the disease. It becomes difficult for Morrison to see over the top of a messy, indecent end in order to recapture the man’s vitality, one that both wreaked havoc and brought joy to his family in the history prior to his final disposition.

Morrison wants to free himself of the tyranny our last estate holds over the long years before it, the injustice of the crystal-clear indignities of old age, butting ahead and breaking into foggier images of health and humor and courage (or even failures and mistakes—ones freely chosen, not the consequence of clouded minds and decrepit bodies). He wants to remember the last time his father was really and truly “him,” the last time he saw the man in full.

Of course, even when he is somewhat able to do so, discerning what and who his father “was” remains a complex task, with its own clouds and shades—some of his father’s making, some of Morrison’s.

The relationship between boy (Colin Firth) and man (Jim Broadbent) unfolds backwards from the point when Morrison’s father is first stricken and diagnosed. Juxtaposed with the man’s modern-day sickbed decline, surrounded by his daughter, wife (Juliet Stevenson), and Morrison, are scenes that betray a past laced more with grudges than charms, more with embarrassment and crossed purposes than a united front.

A physician married to another physician, Dr. Morrison does not appreciate the low-paid impracticality of his son’s academic hopes, nor can he quite fathom why young Blake is unable to bewitch the world with the kind of loud bravura and “hail-fellow-well-met” personality that he himself enjoys. A sort of amiable gall enables the man to lie his way into sporting events and cajole his way into hearts—even those that are younger than his—even those his son had designs on. Does he know he trounces the boy on all fronts? Does he realize the cost it exacts from the child? And can he see that his son is on to his philandering ways, that the lies he tells are shockingly transparent to a boy who, perhaps because he is steeped in a reading life, is all the more suspicious for that fact?

But then there are the dilemmas of the pleasant memories: of the man teaching the boy to drive on a winter’s beach; of tent-camping in unadvisable English weather; in achievements won as a brace rather than alone, such as the lifting and lighting of an heirloom chandelier. And through it all, in tones brighter than they are pale, shines a man with a weakness for the lonely, one who perhaps spread himself too thin, filling voids that were not his to fill. These better moments keep Morrison from consigning his father to a simplistic category. For all the harm he may have caused, it seems never to have been born of a heart that meant ill, or failed to love—if not wisely, then too well.

It was also a heart that called for his son. For throughout the film, a constant memory is that of Dr. Morrison trying to find Blake, just as earnestly as Blake is trying to find his father. That they ever met at all, stood side by side on a common ground, is most owing to this shared desire to do so—to come forth from the shadows that forbid them from each other; to meld, however briefly, in a shared and fading light.