Bates, one of the most emotionally expressive British actors of his generation, is stuck mostly staring silently into space.
In various pasts and presents, the performance rhythms are stilted, though there’s a handsome surface gloss to the original design contributions that’s competently matched by the new sequences. That emotional payoff is missing here, poorly replaced by a gracelessly contrived reconciliation between next-generation father and son two decades later.
SINS OF THE FATHER MOVIE FREE
The novel more vividly paints John as a cold, borderline-abusive husband and father whose repressed daddy issues ultimately free him. Perhaps because this is dramatically awkward, the filmmakers try to ramp up the intensity by having their protagonist driven to near-insanity in his quest to explain dad’s own meltdown. Screwing with the novel’s cleaner plot mechanics in order to deal with this southern European setting, Piddington and Tim Rose Price’s screenplay embroils John in maddening detective work not on home turf (in the book he’s an English government-records clerk) but long-distance, with the Portuguese mental institution painted a place of Kafkaesque menace.
SINS OF THE FATHER MOVIE CRACKED
The major simply cracked one day, ending up a passive mute in a mental hospital outside Lisbon. This takes the form of the original pic’s central action in 1962, when John was a young man driven to distraction - expressed in pointless anger toward wife and child - by the mystery of his war-hero father’s mental collapse. He seeks to explain the actions that drove them apart, also destroying his marriage to Marian (Jill Meager), by revealing the secret he’d dutifully kept until the death of Maj. James Prentis (Bates). Thus we now have middle-aged John Prentis (Wilson) attending his father’s funeral in 1986, then demanding a private audience with the son (a one-dimensionally snippy David Oakes) he alienated years earlier. The new elements, stretching to three generations a story that already had trouble enough with two, only dilute the material further and feel obviously pasted-on.
The original story was already somewhat diminished in impact by Brit tube veteran Piddington’s histrionic yet remote handling, as well as the presumably funding-necessitated (but otherwise senseless) decision to relocate a fair amount of the action from England to Portugal. television showing in 1994, it pretty much disappeared. After the feature unwisely premiered in a less-than-final version at San Sebastian, tepid reviews helped discourage further fest bookings as well as distributor interest, and after one U.K. Swift’s short, cogent book should have made a better film than this one, which was purportedly dogged by production woes even before the cameras started rolling in 1990, then suffered a budget crisis mid-shoot. But this repackaging is unlikely to gain the beleaguered pic much more exposure than it got the first time around.
SINS OF THE FATHER MOVIE PLUS
There’s curiosity value in seeing a hitherto inaccessible if minor performance by the late Alan Bates, plus one by Lambert Wilson straddling a nearly quarter-century interval.
Unfortunately, the new framing device only muddles further what was already a polished but convoluted, emotionally remote misfire. An attempt to salvage a semi-lost feature, Andrew Piddington’s “Sins of a Father” adds footage reuniting some original cast members to the pre-existing “Shuttlecock,” an adaptation of the same-named Graham Swift novel that basically vanished after its San Sebastian Film Festival premiere in 1991.