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Beginners is an oddball little delight from Thumbsucker filmmaker Mike Mills, that begins where it ends. We first meet Oliver (Ewan McGregor) as he’s clearing out the house of his recently deceased father, Hal (Christopher Plummer).
Via a series of flashbacks that are seamlessly integrated with present-tense scenes of Oliver attempting to hash out a relationship with French actress Anna (Melanie Laurent), we learn of Hal’s tricky marriage to Oliver’s mother and his subsequent “coming out of the closet” announcement at 75 years of age once Oliver’s mother dies from cancer.
Owing its title to the fact that both Hal and Oliver are both beginning anew – Hal, with his long-repressed new sexual identity (he now gets to finally wear scarves around his neck) and Oliver with trying to find his way through a new relationship – Beginners finds most of its success from the belief that something this personal can be so universally interesting. That the concrete details of a relationship - the struggles, humor, openness and honesty between a father and son - can resonate so strongly with an audience.
Of course, it all hinges on how well the story is told; and with the aid of a marvelous cast at the top of its game, Mills’s script skillfully tiptoes the tightrope of success by tempering the nearly overwhelming moments of sadness with equally intense bits of elation. Oliver, clearly scarred by a lifetime of emotional detachment, just wants to find someone, and to finally stay with someone. Anna shares a certain amount of Oliver’s generational uncertainties and approaches love with an equal dose of skepticism and hesitation. When the two meet, we can’t help but wish happiness for them both.
Mills takes some big risks with the film’s tiny but impactful moments, such as the relationship Oliver develops with his father’s dog Arthur, a Jack Russell terrier he inherits after Hal dies. Arthur nearly steals the show as he conveys Oliver’s most tender thoughts and moments of private introspection via subtitled captions. A talking dog is a risky device for sure, but Mills pulls off the gimmick like a pro. After all, who amongst us doesn’t speak to our pets?
The filmmaker takes another considerable chance by wrapping his intimate tale in a larger statement of how we perceive our place in history and how we are shaped by the era we grew up in. Thus, the motivation for Oliver’s voice-over sound bites like “this is what love looked like in 1955” and “This is what the sky looked like in 2003” accompanied by graphic imagery resembling period advertising art.
Mike Mills has taken a particularly confusing and painful part of his own life and turned it into a moving expression of acceptance, compromise, and the struggle to overcome obstacles. By most conventional accounts, his somewhat disjointed and meandering tale-of-many-subplots shouldn’t have worked. But his deft skill as a filmmaker, coupled with the weighty performances of the cast make Beginners a strangely enchanting little film.
MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content.
