JFC Movie Review: Beginners

Beginners (*** / ****)
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, Melanie Laurent
Director: Mike Mills

Beginners is an endearing, low-key little movie that doesn’t lean on a single genre – it’s a subtle mix of humor, romance, and drama – but it’s nonetheless betrayed by its trailer, which focuses on its humor that it could easily be mistaken as a comedy. Scenes that are amusing when watched out of context aren’t necessarily so during the course of the entire film, and so anyone going in expecting a steady stream of laughs will be sorely disappointed. What Beginners does have is heart and soul; writer-director Mike Mills’ inspiration was his own family and professional life, and it shows.

It’s sometime in 2003, and Oliver Fields (Ewan McGregor) is starting a new chapter in his life following the death of his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), and his lone companion is Hal’s ever-loyal longhaired Jack Russell terrier, Arthur, who “speaks” to Oliver via onscreen captions. (Animal lovers will melt at this. Heck, I even talk in complete sentences to my cat.)

Oliver works as a graphic artist who, in a small subplot, is attempting to design a CD cover for a group oddly named “The Sads,” during which his restless mind causes him to conjure a series of chicken-scratch Sharpie portraits of his past failed relationships and “…all I got was this lousy T-shirt” slogans. It’s at a company costume party that the downbeat Oliver meets Anna, a young French actress (played by Melanie Laurent, a young French actress), who initially has laryngitis that renders her unable to speak, so they communicate via written notes instead of text messaging, during which she gently chides him for showing up at a sad party. It blossoms into another familiar indie-movie convenient romance, but the sentimental fool in me was happy he’d found someone so that he wouldn’t be alone in his period of mourning.

The story intertwines Oliver’s present day with Anna with flashbacks of his last months with Hal, during which we’re treated to a wonderful performance by Plummer. As Oliver informs the audience in a beginning-of-the-film voiceover, Hal and his wife were married in 1955, and lived happily for the next 44 years until she died, after which Hal announces he’s now come out of the closet; he’d kept his sexual orientation under wraps the entire duration of his marriage. Mills doesn’t resort to pandering or fanfare here; he just has Plummer calmly speak two words to the camera: “I’m gay.” In fact, in just one of several instances of wonderful dry wit in the script, Oliver’s biggest concern during this scene is remembering what his father was wearing at the time of his announcement. Hal now has a new lease on life, along with a younger lover, slightly grungy Andy (Goran Visnjic).

As McGregor’s Oliver spends most of the film in Debbie Downer mode, Beginners garners much of its humor and contrasting warmth from Plummer, whose Hal often seems like a big kid in an aging body, even though he’s nearing the end of the road with terminal Stage 4 cancer. He even has a mini-party in his hospital room with about a dozen pals, during which a nurse gently admonishes them for imbibing on the premises, which is met by playful jeering. Long story short, Hal is determined to die happy, and Plummer flawlessly conveys this message onscreen.

Beginners doesn’t really have a standard narrative; there’s no big conflict, life-changing lessons or happy ending. Even Hal’s sexuality, which could have been embellished further in the name of pandering to gay audiences, barely registers on the radar after Oliver’s initial shock. Often the pace seems to mirror Oliver uneventfully getting through each day and figuring out where to take his relationship with Anna. It’s with the latter, though, that Mills seems to run short of ideas, as he pulls the old she-leaves-him-then-comes-back card late in the picture, but he balances out the sentimentality with heartwrenching yet calm scenes of Hal’s last days in hospice care and his inevitable demise, after which Oliver weeping openly while knelt at Hal’s bedside, his back to the camera that soon cuts to a wide shot, almost as if it were asking the audience to respect his privacy. Despite its occasional doses of tweeness, Mills treats the characters like real people with real feelings and imbues his film with a sense of hope, not just for Oliver, but for ourselves.

© 2011 Jane F. Carlson


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