The Son

Well-acted but overly melodramatic, this stage-to-screen adaptation stars Hugh Jackman as a man struggling with an unstable son and his own lingering guilt and resentment.

It’s usually not hard to spot stage-to-screen adaptations, particularly dramas. They generally have a small cast, with very few locations or just one central one. And they tend to focus on the emotional turmoil if families, lovers and close friends.

“The Son” is the rare stage adaptation directed by the guy who wrote the play, Florian Zeller. He also made “The Father” a couple of years ago starring Anthony Hopkins as an old man struggling with dementia, and he returns here in a small role playing the same character or one very much like him.

But Hugh Jackman is the central figure here as his son, Peter Miller, a successful New York lawyer struggling with his own 17-year-old son. Nicholas (a superb Zen McGrath) harbors an ocean of resentment against Peter because he left his mother, Kate (Laura Dern), when he was just a kid and eventually married Beth (Vanessa Kirby). The recently had their own baby boy and Peter, at the age of 50, has become a father a second time.

A lot of times in stories like this about fractured families, the resentment and finger-pointing is kept as an unspoken theme. Not here. Nicholas is quite upfront about blaming his father for his and his mother’s unhappiness.

Over the course of the movie — Zeller adapted the screenplay along with Christopher Hampton — Peter will go on a journey where he has to confront Nicholas’ mental instability, and his own long-harbored beef against his own old man, an all-work businessman he fears he has come to resemble.

It’s a well-acted piece, though we feel the constraints of its stage origins. For me it was overly melodramatic and even a bit hammy at times. You wonder if it might have translated better with someone besides Zeller at the helm who wouldn’t have been afraid to stray from the source material.

As the story opens, Kate comes to Peter begging for help with Nicholas, who has stopped going to school for more than a month. The kid is moody, intense — and frightening. For awhile we wonder if this is going to wander into an area where a kid does something tragic and newsworthy.

Peter agrees to talk to him, and is irritated by Nicholas’ inability to articulate what’s wrong with himself. He just feel like he doesn’t fit anywhere and find life itself a burden.

To Peter’s surprise, Nicholas asks to come live with him. Kate, clearly at the end of her rope and beginning to become genuinely afraid of her own son, agrees. Beth, deeply ensconced in nesting mode, tries to be welcoming but her energies are clearly devoted first to her newborn infant.

Meanwhile, Peter has been approached about joining a national political campaign that could send his career into a new stratosphere — while also follow more in his father’s footsteps than he’d like. He frets about working all the time and not putting enough effort into being a parent.

For me, the primary dynamic driving the story was our uncertainty about Nicholas and his true motives. He seems like a genuinely vulnerable, mixed up kid who focuses his negative emotions inward — as evidenced by his habit of cutting his arms. I was surprised to see a movie that understood people do this not out of a masochistic craving to cause pain, but as a coping mechanism for what they’re already experiencing.

But as we’ll see, Nicholas is also smart and manipulative. He works to sow seeds of doubt with Peter or subtly cause strife between him and Beth. We wonder where the dark journey he’s on will take him.

I can’t say as I was much surprised by anything that happens in “The Son.” I always felt a few beats ahead of the storytelling — up to and including a coda near the end that isn’t hard to sniff out.

Usually I’m a sucker for movies about fathers and sons struggling to connect with each other or reconcile old hurts. But I found myself strangely emotionally disconnected from this one.

It’s a solid effort from Jackman, though I think he maybe wasn’t the perfect match for this role. He’s at his best playing men whose inner turmoil is reflected in exterior action, not just in his superhero roles but in films like “Prisoners.”

Hopkins is chilling and terrific in the single scene he has. Dern and Kirby are able to display some minor-key shadings to their characters despite clearly existing in the wings of Peter and Nicholas’ story.

I think McGrath is the presence people will most remember from “The Son.” It’s a star-making sort of role that reminded me of Timothy Hutton in “Ordinary People” or Edward Norton in “Primal Fear.” A vulnerable boy is often a compelling figure, because so often they project their pain into the world around them with tragic results.