Before Silence of the Lambs made him a "movie star," Anthony Hopkins turned in a number of intelligent and nuanced performances. The Good Father is one of them. For one thing, it is the only movie I know of that hints at the impulse to filicide, unwilled, by no means perverse, but nevertheless the acknowledgment that one's child has contributed to one's doom. It comes to Hopkins' character in dreams. They disturb him terribly. One should simply not feel like that.

But in the picture's very last shot, a flashback, where Hopkins watches his wife stroke her swollen stomach with tears streaming from her eyes, it becomes clear that the child will become and has become the end of them. "You were the love of my life," he tells her after the child is born and they are separated.

Paralelling his own situation is another Brit's. Hopkins takes up with a man who is distraught because his wife has left him (for another woman) and is planning to take their son. Hopkins' character supports and subsidizes his new friend in his efforts to beat this man's wife in court. The man wins, compromises out of court with his wife to see his son, and spurns Hopkins' purported help with contempt. Hopkins loses.

A superb study of a rarely looked at human complexity.

This movie solidified why I like Anthony Hopkins so much. He is seething with such rage and horror. It amazes me that he can act like this, but in some movies he can be so calm, like another film that was released the same year this one was, 84 Charring Cross Road (costarring the great Anne Bancroft.) The reason I love The Good Father is because it's a very interesting story and it shows several talents that hadn't quite made it yet. Hopkins hadn't yet made The Silence of the Lambs. Jim Broadbent, who plays the man Hopkins' character is trying to help get his son back, hadn't won his Oscar for his role in Iris. Also Mike Newell, the director, hadn't made a name for himself either. After this film, he made Four Weddings and a Funeral. If you want to see a great drama with superb performances, watch this film. If you like Hopkins in anything, then definitely see this movie.