Because his glass-half-full mentality starts to feel less like encouragement than like denial. Everything that makes Jackman such a worthy man of musical theater is what makes him such an ironic and pained father to a boy like Nicholas. Something about his can-do spirit, the searching wisdom in his eyes, his confidence in the bright side.

Jackman’s casting is probably the single most effective thing about this movie - because Peter is deluding himself. When he’s asked what’s wrong, he says that life has been weighing him down. When he’s asked what’s happening when he skips school, he tells his parents that he’s been going for walks. His SATs are coming up and he does not seem keen on preparing for them, which means that he is not as intently focused on his future as a teen on the verge of graduation ought to be. His parents are only too late to find this out. Here, a father is trying to save the memory of his son, in a story that begins when the son, Nicholas (Zen McGrath), is 17 years old and on the verge of being expelled from school after months of skipping.

The Son, Zeller’s new movie, was similarly adapted from a work that the filmmaker and playwright crafted for the stage, and is similarly intergenerational and tense. Florian Zeller’s The Father, released in 2020, attempted to understand an octogenarian man’s dementia from a first-person perspective, allowing the confusing mix of memory and present-tense, of people and places, to become the story.

Japanese movie like father like son