Nick Stark, BW Film Critic
A WISE MAN once wrote that the key to good movie-making is taking an idea audiences have seen many times before and making it fresh and new.
Beginners, a new movie from Mike Mills, starring Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer, doesn’t quite do that, but amid the early summer wash of Hollywood blockbusters, it does make for a charming and original diversion.
At the film’s center is Oliver (McGregor), an LA-based illustrator whose work serves only to reflect his tangled personal life. Oliver is a man in his late 30s who must come to terms with both his mother’s death and the subsequent announcement from his father Hal (Plummer) that he is gay and he intends ‘to do something about it’ – i.e. live out his remaining years as a gay man. And there are not many of them, as it turns out, as Hal is quickly diagnosed with terminal cancer.
So far, so sad. To make matters worse for Oliver, he’s a man who has sensed the loveless nature of his parents marriage and as consequence has trouble with commitment himself. Enter Anna (Melanie Laurent), a mischievous French actress who is drawn to sad cases because of her own troubled relationship with her father. The two begin a charming and cautious two-step that could as easily be the first tentative steps of two teenage lovers.
With an intricate, clever screenplay that takes us back and forth in Oliver’s life, “Beginners” starts with Oliver packing up Hal’s home after the funeral. (“Four years after he came out, he died in this room,” we’re told in a sad voice-over.) Next we see vignettes of Oliver’s early life, with his father a distant workaholic figure, and his mother responding to the confines of her life by being ever-more-erratic in public.
Hal reports in to his son with unrestrained delight as he explores gay culture, house music and finds a handsome young lover (Goran Visjnic, a long way from the ER), while Oliver can only look on, half bemused, half delighted, at this father’s final rejection of the societal restraints that have hindered his father’s life hitherto.
Then there is Arthur, Hal’s Jack Russell, who attaches himself to Oliver after Hal’s death and absolutely will not be left alone or ignored. The uncomplicated boundless love of the dog is an obvious counterpoint to the tortured relationships of the humans, but director Mills handles Arthur with such a deft touch that even the dog’s occasionally subtitled thoughts remain chaming rather than corny.
Apparently the story is heavily autobiographical, but Mills walks adroitly down the narrow line between whimsy and schmaltz. Anchoring the film are two very strong performances from McGregor and Plummer – especially the latter, who seems to be relishing his late-career renaissance. Vijnic and Laurent are less succesful, but they and go without disturbing the gently insistent narrative whose message seems to be, no matter what age, we are all beginners when it comes to love.
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