Jim Broadbent is Arthur Morrison and Matthew Beard is his son Blake in a flashback scene from the sentimental When Did You Last See Your Father?

Sony Pictures Classics / Giles Keyte

Blake Morrison’s autobiographical book about the distance between fathers and sons has been turned into a sensitive, sentimental and melancholy film that will touch any male who has had difficulty bridging that particular generation gap.

In When Did You Last See Your Father?, director Anand Tucker, whose most recent film was 2005’s Shopgirl with Steve Martin and Claire Danes, portrays the touchy tightrope between love and hate that many sons walk with unflinching clarity.

The film is told between the here and now, when the larger-than-life Arthur Morrison (Jim Broadbent) is on his deathbed and his son Blake (Colin Firth) is searching his own soul to define the sometimes testy relationship that existed with his father, and flashbacks to the past, where Blake thinks he will find clues to where that relationship went wrong. Blake, we see in those flashbacks, has spent much of his life feeling that his father never truly appreciated him. Even when Blake has become a celebrated writer and receives an award for his work, Arthur dismissively points out that the award is made of plastic and that Blake might have done better in life had he become a doctor like both Arthur and his wife, Kim (Juliet Stevenson).

As the film skitters between the present and the past (where Blake is played by Bradley Johnson at age 8 and Matthew Beard at 14), we see only a few of the joyous moments they’ve shared and a lot of the times when Blake suffers under his father’s offhanded digs. In Blake’s bittersweet collection of memories, there are more that are bitter than sweet. Along the memory road, Blake realizes his father has had at least one, and possibly more, affairs. He even believes he may have a half sister as a result. It’s a question that bedevils him for years.

Arthur is a complex character with many sides and Broadbent lets us see both the wonderfully warm, caring and funny man that he can be as well as the insensitively cruel one, a side that Arthur himself doesn’t always realize he’s showing. So the scenes in which he puts Blake on the road to manhood — teaching him how to drive; looking the other way when Blake has his first romance with the family housekeeper — both show Arthur’s compassion and let us know that there’s a lot more than the rude, awkward face he can sometimes show.

The flashback segments allow Tucker, with a screenplay by David Nicholls, to deftly show the changing relationship between a father and a son. The young Blake at first thinks of his father as a hero — “infallible, invincible, immortal even” — as Arthur blusters his way into getting the family trackside seats at an auto race. Later, as a teenager, Arthur’s practical jokes and bluntness embarrass Blake’s equilibrium. Later still, as a middle-aged man with his own family, Blake tries to make amends and find out where the relationship went off the tracks, eventually realizing that in some ways he has become his father. It’s a universal theme that’s played out subtly on screen.

Firth plays the inquiring son, sifting through the past to make the connection he needs to see his father off on his last journey. He’s angry that Arthur, riddled with cancer on his deathbed, refuses to have a heart-to-heart talk with him which Blake hopes will break through the wall that Arthur has erected around himself. Blake hopes to find the closeness he longs for.

And yet in his reminiscences Blake eventually grows to understand his father better and comes to realize the bond that really did exist between them. This makes for an extraordinarily moving final 20 minutes in When Did You Last See Your Father? Anyone who has lost a father will be near tears and will understand.

****When Did You Last See Your Father?

Starring: Colin Firth, Jim Broadbent, Juliet Stevenson, Matthew Beard.

Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes, sexual situations, brief profanity.

mjanuson@projo.com