‘The Son’ review: Hugh Jackman drama keep its distance

The apple falls lamentably far from the tree where Florian Zeller’s “The Son” is concerned.

Keeping it in the thematic family — but not the same family — as his heralded 2020 directorial debut, “The Father,” which deservedly earned an Oscar for star Anthony Hopkins, the film, like its predecessor, began life as part of a stage trilogy dealing with various manifestations of mental illness.

But where the Hopkins vehicle delivered an unflinching, stirringly effective portrait of dementia as exhibited from the main character’s ambiguous point of view, here, the depiction of teenage acute depression settles for shallow character development and self-indulgent tropes that distract from a strong Hugh Jackman performance.

Settling into a second marriage with considerably younger Beth (Vanessa Kirby) and a newborn son, Jackman’s Peter Miller is a successful Manhattan attorney with political ambitions whose seemingly unflappable reserve threatens to burst at the seams after his troubled 17-year-old son, Nicholas (newcomer Zen McGrath), comes to live with them.

“You can’t just abandon him,” chastens harried ex-wife, Kate (Laura Dern), but Peter’s subsequent attempts to bond with his incommunicative kid are thwarted by decidedly darker, suicidal impulses going well beyond Nicholas’ resentment over his parents’ divorce.

They serve to untether Peter’s barely disguised dysfunctional relationship with his own bullying dad (Hopkins, in a brief but coldly efficient cameo), which further put his own parental abilities into question.

Just in case we somehow miss the conceit that both Peter and Nicholas could equally lay claim to the film’s title, Zeller keeps throwing in visual cues, including several shots of a washing machine’s spin cycle, which accentuate the pervasive sins-of-the-father undercurrent.

All that signaling serves to diminish the impact of a not unanticipated “shock” denouement that strives for poignancy but ultimately flirts with mawkishness.

Strip away the unnecessary directorial flourishes and you’re left with a script, again co-written by Zeller and Christopher Hampton (they shared a best adapted screenplay Oscar for “The Father”), that ultimately adds little of substance to the conversation about clinical depression and provides insufficient depth for its supporting characters.

While Jackman remains absolutely connected to the role of Peter — a man who ultimately implodes under the sheer weight of attempting to contain each new situation that arises, his co-stars have been given less to motivate them.

Dern, especially, who has in the past infused so many of her characters with a spirited spark, is wasted here, stuck in perpetually anguished mode as the wronged wife and distraught mother.

Zeller and Hampton, who also collaborated on the English-language translation of the first play in his trilogy, “The Mother,” which had a 2019 run in New York, starring Isabelle Huppert as a parent wrestling with emotional stability, have come up disappointingly short this time around.

Where “The Father” succeeded brilliantly in placing the viewer directly in the shuffling shoes of its mentally deteriorating protagonist, attempting to navigate the smudged boundaries between past and present, “The Son” persists in holding its characters and their all-too-real struggles frustratingly out of reach.