Peter (Hugh Jackman) has divorced and remarried Beth (Vanessa Kirby), but maintains a civil if fragile relationship with his ex-wife Kate (Laura Dern) and his son from his first marriage, Nicholas (Zen McGrath). Troubled by their divorce, Nicholas has become withdrawn and asks to live with his father. With his own life already busy and a young baby with his new wife, Peter attempts to reach his son and maintain his own ambitions...
Divorce stories, be it the beginning of the end of a marriage or what follows after the end, are usually good fodder for actors to stretch and contort themselves into all kinds of emotionally charged moments. The connection that is formed and broken has to be real, because without it, you're just looking at two strangers acting at each other. Even in something like 'Kramer Vs. Kramer' where Meryl Streep is absent for a large portion of the story, we still have the sense of a life lived with Dustin Hoffman and their on-screen child.
'The Son' is more about disconnection, about how families in the wake of divorce disconnect from one another, and the fallout that comes from it. Hugh Jackman's character has moved on and married a younger woman and is forming a new family unit with her, while Laura Dern's character and their child are left behind. The story only picks up when Zen McGrath's character has effectively pushed Laura Dern to her limits and asks Hugh Jackman to intervene. We get no sense of their life before, save for a series of flashbacks on one idyllic holiday that looks like an advertisement for a life insurance company. Of course, being that this is adapted from a play, the characters are expected to bring us through dialogue.
Yet, what comes through in 'The Son' is neither convincing nor does it give us any wider indication of where these characters are or how they came to be so unhappy in their lives, or how false it's all become for them. Everything is surface-level, sure; they're affluent New Yorkers and the like, but the writing itself isn't supposed to be just as shallow. That's what 'The Son' really is - a shallow examination of a dark and serious topic. So often in this, you're left wondering where it's heading and it's very often using fake-outs and misdirection, be it intentional or otherwise. Zen McGrath's performance ping-pongs between menacing and whining, never settling on either for it to make sense or convincing of either extreme.
You can tell that Hugh Jackman is eager for the role, that it has more depth and substance than anything he's done in quite some time. Yet, for all of his insistence, it just doesn't translate into a particularly remarkable performance. Anthony Hopkins crops up for a single scene as Jackman's estranged asshole father, but it's all for naught. Laura Dern, likewise, only has a handful of scenes and they're mostly just them wallowing through the sadness without any kind of anchor to it. The worst part of 'The Son' comes in its final act, which has such a fake-out ending as to be completely disingenuous and bordering on just plain old manipulative.
It's not that the subject matter that 'The Son' deals with is particularly thorny that makes it so poor because any director would struggle with it. Rather, 'The Son' disappoints because it does nothing to speak to the reality of the subject matter. Its mawkishness, its insincerity, and the stageyness - deliberate or otherwise - just underline how much of a failure it truly is.
