The old man, a doctor, is dying. His wife weeps and waits. But when his son finally arrives, the first few cuts of criticism from his dad send him on a long remembrance of this withered chap in the bed before him, memories full of contradictions, anger and regret.

You'd never think to pair Oscar winner Jim Broadbent and dashing leading man Colin Firth as father and son. But it works in "When Did You Last See Your Father?," a modestly affecting coming-of-age, coming-to-grips-with-death drama about a son who tries to understand his insufferable dad as he sits by his father's deathbed.

The film, based on a memoir by poet Blake Morrison, is about a son who has spent his life annoyed that his father could never put together "two little words, 'well' and 'done.' " The bookish intellectual Blake (Firth, doing a good "wounded and confused") grew up feeling overshadowed and ill-used by his gregarious, blustery dad (Broadbent, terrific as always), a doctor who lived for "little scams," ways of getting more than his share out of life.

Dad lied, cheated and bullied, ever the center of a dad-centered universe. He never seemed, to his son (Bradley Johnson and Matthew Beard play the younger Blake) to have a moment's consideration for the ways his words and actions robbed others. Egocentric in the extreme, "Dad" is greedy emotionally, sexually and financially, a real piece of work.

"He was lost if he couldn't cheat in some way," the son recalls.

In flashbacks by his father's deathbed, the son remembers dad's clumsy and self-serving efforts at bonding, his possible philandering, the seminal moments from a childhood and adolescence spent in loathing for his father.

In coming-of-age terms, there's little here we haven't seen before, right down to the awkward kid's efforts to lose his virginity or learn to drive. The weight of the film is in the unpleasant side of the know-it-all dad. But even Dad has his moments, little undeclared declarations of love from a parent to a child.

Eventually the heavy-handed flashbacks, with their over-saturated colors, coalesce into something universal about fathers and sons. But even as director Anand Tucker — he did the equally emotionally constipated "Shopgirl" — struggles to make the film something more than a 1960s period piece set in the lovely English countryside, his movie frustrates, maddeningly veering off into a creepy sexual "coming of age" reverie (and then revisiting it).

Broadbent's larger-than-life performance and that 1960s British setting (a more repressed era for the English male?) are the reasons to see "When Did You Last See Your Father?" and to plumb its meaning. But there have been more moving and more succinct explorations of the movie's weary moral, expressed by the son as if he'd never thought of this before.

"You spend your lifetime avoiding talking to someone, and then it's too late."