And When Did You Last See Your Father?

To bowdlerize Larkin: they precipitate an awful lot of nostalgic introspection, your mum and dad. As you might have guessed from its less-than-snappy title, the film adaptation of Blake Morrison's best-selling memoir, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, focuses on the paternal side of the Oedipal chestnut. Colin Firth plays the adult Morrison, forced to redress his relationship with his dying father (Jim Broadbent) as their shared past bubbles over with unresolved resentments, humiliations and many, many flashbacks.

In his 1993 book Morrison shrewdly avoided sentimentality; his steely, dispassionate prose fashioned an unflinchingly candid account of the author's struggle to resolve his feelings about a man by whom he felt perpetually overshadowed. David Nicholls' pared-down screenplay was "a gift" for Hilary and Jackie helmer Anand Tucker, who came on board shortly after leaving the production of The Golden Compass in a storm of 'creative differences'. "It really moved me, and I wanted to do it, it was a simple as that," recalls Tucker, "It was one of those rare lightning strikes moments."

"I was intrigued by what the director would make of it, because I suppose it is a very internal kind of book," admits Morrison. "It's a memoir about my relationship with my father and I'm the narrator, I'm not a character in the book, and that would have been a difficulty for me if I was adapting it – turning myself into a character. Luckily someone else wrote the screenplay and was able to create this person called Blake who occasionally I recognised."

Tucker takes the raw honesty and wry humour of the original text and slathers it with all the period gloss he can muster: saturated colours of summer days in short trousers and slow motion; graceful movements between past and present, shot through with the rosy tints of nostalgia. Even the contemporary sections have a muted glamour to them, Colin Firth managing to fit in a bathtub scene between melancholy ruminations to keep the distaff demographic happy.

"There's something very compelling about real life, and the way Blake was so honest about what happens to you when someone's dying," Tucker says, "It was essential to preserve that truthfulness, and hopefully it will allow an audience to experience their own emotions through the filter of the character, and move them without them feeling exploited."

Yet despite an immaculately crafted exterior, And When… is a curiously unmoving affair. There's little emotional depth and no real attempt to make more universal connections, the audience is always kept at a distance. But it's still very watchable, in a Sunday-afternoon-with-teacakes-and-cocoa kind of way. There are some moments of genuine tenderness – Matthew Beard as the teenage Blake is particularly good, his long-limbed awkwardness and clumsy attempts at flirtation exquisitely heightened by Broadbent's rambunctiousness.

Playing the late Arthur Morrison as a bluff charmer, Broadbent is a joy – all blustering bonhomie and ebullient humour. And that's really the problem: in comparison Firth's Blake seems self-obsessed and whiny, a faintly patricidal middle-class bore, raking over old grudges as he looks back in ambivalence. What the film hints at, but never quite articulates, is that the adult Blake has to reconcile himself with his past selves, as much as with his fallible, ultimately unknowable paterfamilias. Getting even with dad is all very well, but – as Wordsworth memorably observed – it is the child who is the father of the man.