In “The Factor with Feathers,” Benedict Cumberbatch performs a London creator of graphic novels who, fairly out of the blue, finds himself a widower (his beloved spouse collapsed on the kitchen flooring and died). In an early scene, we see him attempt to maintain an environment of on a regular basis normality as he places breakfast collectively for his two younger sons. Nevertheless it’s not taking place. He seems like he’s juggling 4 duties without delay; he burns the toast after which frantically tries to scrape off the charred half (a mistake).
The character, who is rarely named (he’s referred to within the credit as “Dad”), has already proven the depths of his grief, sitting on the sofa after the funeral, his tears slowly gushing forth. When Benedict Cumberbatch enacts a second like this, you possibly can guess that you simply’re not simply seeing an actor cry; you’re seeing him act with each tear. Cumberbatch, in just a few moments, expresses the depth of this father’s agony, the terrifying chasm of it.
However that early-morning kitchen episode captures a special facet of grief. It jogged my memory of the scene in “Kramer vs. Kramer” the place Dustin Hoffman, as a newly separated father now alone along with his son, tries to carry it collectively by making breakfast, which turns right into a mini catastrophe. A part of the facility of “Kramer vs. Kramer” is that it understands — greater than different divorce motion pictures do — that one of many miseries of a wedding ending is out of the blue having to do every part you depended in your partner for. It’s not that the loss is merely logistical; that, nevertheless, is an actual a part of it. At one level in “The Factor with Feathers,” Cumberbatch says that he relied on his spouse for…every part. For some time, I had hopes that the film, with a lacerating intimacy, would dramatize how insanely overwhelming the lifetime of a widower like this one could be — emotionally, spiritually, virtually.
What I wasn’t relying on was the issues with feathers. It begins off as a hen — a crow, to be exact, which imposes itself on the viewers in closeup shock cuts of beak and wings, like one thing out of a horror movie. It is smart, in a approach, to say that the sudden lack of a partner may summon a primal feeling of horror. But in “The Factor with Feathers,” we’re a bit shocked to see this expressed by means of randomly staged soar scares. Why is that this crow hovering round anyway?
Truly, it’s greater than a crow. It’s a character — or the herald of 1. For simply as Cumberbatch and his two boys, who’re additionally by no means named (sure, it’s that type of film), are contending with this intrusive, cawing, wing-shuffling feathered foe, there’s an much more majestic menace readily available: an eight-foot tall big crow, often called…Crow, who speaks, courtesy of the actor David Thewlis, in a voice of sinister British portent, as if he had been the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh crossed with Edgar Allen Poe’s Raven saying “Nevermore!” He says issues like “Good morning, English widower! Sleep effectively, did we?” At first, he seems to be there to harass and terrorize Cumberbatch, or possibly to behave as an embodiment of his fears.
And he’s certainly type of a projection: of the woe and alienation Cumberbatch is feeling. For Cumberbatch, trapped within the muck of his ache, is using artwork as his approach out. Seated in his house studio, he makes use of black ink to attract elaborate footage (of a crow) that appear like they got here out of a gothic nightmare. They would be the illustrations of his new graphic novel. So is he dreaming all this up? Perhaps, however Crow is kind of actually there: a menacing huge hen who has come into the room to interface with Cumberbatch, to be his supernatural playmate and thinker and tough-love therapist. This demon hen might look intimidating, however he’s there to heal.
There’s a little bit of tony pretense concerned. A Wikipedia entry informs me that Crow “is the Crow from Ted Hughes’ 1970 poetry e-book.” Effectively! It nonetheless appears like one thing out of a megaplex fright flick. “The Factor with Fathers” is a getting-over-grief film that strands itself in a netherworld between psychological drama and “darkish” fantasy. Written and directed by Dylan Southern, who based mostly it on Max Porter’s 2015 novella “Grief is the Issues with Feathers,” the movie is kind of taken with its personal ambition, which it signifies visually, with an almost sq. facet ratio and pictures of burnished gloom. However the entire thing is oppressive and, in an odd approach, not very attention-grabbing.
Crow by no means turns into a gripping character; he’s too sternly summary, too hectoring, an excessive amount of of a visible impact searching for a persona. And his huge lesson, whereas unassailable, is just not precisely the stuff of revelation. It appears that evidently the movie desires to evangelise a message in regards to the distinction between grief and despair. Grief, it suggests, is sweet, despair not a lot. Anybody who has suffered a tragedy must grieve, to confront and take care of it — however there’s a distinction between trustworthy grieving and wallowing in your ache. Simpler mentioned than performed, maybe, however for a drama about grief this performs like one thing out of Psychological Well being 101.
Cumberbatch, in fact, has to go too far — into wallowing — or there wouldn’t be a film. He wants to bop like a madman at midnight whereas drunk as a skunk on whiskey. The actor colours in lots of moments with trustworthy feeling, however he has nobody to play off. The movie so fails to characterize the 2 boys (who’re portrayed by lookalike brothers, Richard and Henry Boxall) that it barely distinguishes between them. And that relationship, between a father and his sons as they negotiate their new life and try to wriggle out of the claws of the despair demon, ought to have been central. As a substitute, we’re caught with a solitary character locked in a ritualized interface along with his ominous feathered pal. Which seems to be a moderately bird-brained thought.
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