The two fathers are Anthony Hopkins and Jim Broadbent, Hopkins has left his wife but still cares for his son, and he meets Broadbent at a party as he is crying over the loss of his son, as his wife has taken the son away to live with a lesbian. Hopkins decides to do something about Jim's luckless situation, there are court proceedings and Broadbent wins, but his wife changes her mind and gives up the lesbian friend, and thus they are at least half way reconciled. Also Hopkins is half way reconciled with his wife, a charming woman, who still cares for him. It's a documentary about very mixed feelings, it just exposes relationship problems without really solving them and without really leading anywhere, except to a kind of half-hearted status quo. It is not a very cheerful picture, the environments are as bleak as the film, so you will probably not see this film again. Fathers can't separate from their sons, and neither can their mothers, so obviously the parents should not separate in the first place. That's about all the moral this film has to offer.

Before Silence of the Lambs made him a "movie star," Anthony Hopkins turned in a number of intelligent and nuanced performances. The Good Father is one of them. For one thing, it is the only movie I know of that hints at the impulse to filicide, unwilled, by no means perverse, but nevertheless the acknowledgment that one's child has contributed to one's doom. It comes to Hopkins' character in dreams. They disturb him terribly. One should simply not feel like that.

But in the picture's very last shot, a flashback, where Hopkins watches his wife stroke her swollen stomach with tears streaming from her eyes, it becomes clear that the child will become and has become the end of them. "You were the love of my life," he tells her after the child is born and they are separated.

Paralelling his own situation is another Brit's. Hopkins takes up with a man who is distraught because his wife has left him (for another woman) and is planning to take their son. Hopkins' character supports and subsidizes his new friend in his efforts to beat this man's wife in court. The man wins, compromises out of court with his wife to see his son, and spurns Hopkins' purported help with contempt. Hopkins loses.

A superb study of a rarely looked at human complexity.