Saved by Jim

Although And When Did You Last See Your Father? is probably not a great work of cinema, and may not even be a work of cinema at all — it could easily be 90 minutes of above-par Sunday night telly — it is touching and the cast are wonderful. That Jim Broadbent, can he do anything wrong? I don’t think so. I think he could recite the menu from Pizza Hut and somehow make it not just a must-see event, but poignant, too. How does he do that? I have no idea, as I know little about anything, but I do know this: Jim Broadbent saves this film, if it is a film, from what could have so easily been mush and sentimentality at every turn.

And When…is, of course, based on writer Blake Morrison’s 1993 best-selling memoir dealing with the experience of watching his father, Arthur Morrison, die of cancer, and his desperate attempts in those very last days to address a lifetime of conflicting emotions.