Directed by Anand Tucker with the same intelligent tact he brought to Hilary and Jackie, and cleanly adapted by David Nicholls from a brutally frank memoir by British writer Blake Morrison, this minor pleasure about an aggrieved son (Colin Firth in the Blake role) re-evaluating his relationship with his cantankerous old sod of a dying father (Jim Broadbent as Arthur Morrison) is the kind of superior middlebrow filmmaking at which the Brits excel. Excellent team-player acting from the likes of Juliet Stevenson, as the put-upon wife, and Sarah Lancashire, as the reflexively carnal other woman, rounds out Broadbent's characteristically elastic performance as a father more heedless than cruel. But the star is gangly young Matthew Beard, who gives a wonderfully precise reading of the teenage Blake, trapped in a morass of self-righteous arrogance and confusion.
