Beginners (2011)

The thing about watching a movie with a conflicted principal character is that I generally want to kick them in the butt to get them moving in the right direction. Ewan McGregor's Oliver in this story kept spinning his wheels in the relationship with Anna (Melanie Laurent), even when it looked like he might have been having fun. After a while, it began to affect Anna, that's her quote above in my summary line.The one who genuinely knew what he was doing was Oliver's father Hal, wonderfully performed by Christopher Plummer. His was the kind of role in a popular film that forever after makes you wonder if the man is still alive or not, like Burgess Meredith in the 'Rocky' movies. I just looked him up, and he's still going strong at eighty seven, with four movies in post-production.I liked Plummer in this film, his portrayal of a gay man coming out after the death of his wife of forty five years was handled with a sincerity that could have been over the top if handled by a different film maker. My understanding is that writer and director Mike Mills had a similar life experience with his own father which formed the basis of this story. With that understanding, he would have had some valuable insight.Back to Oliver - seriously, you've got to ditch that hideous wall poster of 'Siedem Razy Kobieta'. Even though this was a movie, seeing it hanging in the living room seriously upset my personal feng shui. If you couldn't make the whole thing out, it was the Polish theatrical poster for Shirley MacLaine's film "Woman Times Seven". How that fit into Oliver's life I couldn't tell you, but it caused me some pain.This movie probably won't appeal to everyone. Even today, there's some resistance to the idea of gay characters in film though that's changing daily. As I stated earlier, the subject is handled maturely without being offensive, and the movie fairly conveys a live and let live philosophy. A hint for Oliver, learn to live a little.

Love, sadness, identity, grief, hope, generational divides, parent- child relationships – there are enough themes in Mike Mills' "Beginners" for a dozen films, yet they all sit in this one emotional, stirring story. Calling it messy would be accurate, but it's messy in the way life is messy.Although the sound bite summary/one-sentence pitch of this film is "a man learns that his 70-some-year-old father is gay and terminally ill," that's a somewhat gross over-simplification. The story isn't that linear, and the plot doesn't follow the son's challenges dealing with and accepting this information. Instead, it's about how a father's renaissance in the last years of his life impact a son who, at nearly 40, has yet to get a grip on his own life.Ewan McGregor stars as Oliver and Christopher Plummer as Hal, his father, who came out to Oliver after Oliver's mother passed away and started dating a younger man. Oliver, as narrator, reveals his father died four years later and the film interweaves a present day timeline following Oliver after Hal's death; memories from the four years before Hal died; and a few flashbacks to Oliver's relationship with his mother during childhood.In the present, Oliver meets a young woman named Anna (Melanie Laurent) at a party and throughout their courtship, lucid memories from timelines in the past slip in and out of Oliver's consciousness. His ability to trust and to love deeply are colored by how out of love his parents were yet also by how truly in love Hal was with his boyfriend, Andy (Goran Visnjic).It is difficult to pull apart the tangled web of love and grief and all those other factors that create an emotional stranglehold on Oliver, which is simultaneously what's so beautiful about Mills' script and most difficult. The myriad moments that comprise "Beginners" so effortlessly connect with the viewer, but sequentially, as the memories cut in and out, it can be difficult to draw the thematic linkages between one timeline and another as it fits into the organizational structure of the film.What the mind may struggle to process the heart easily latches on to in "Beginners." The acting and the on-screen relationship between characters have a powerfully genuine feel to them. Although Plummer, McGregor and Laurent all bring something to the table, Mills intuits all the right camera angles and distances and pacing that firmly places the action or dialogue into a most convincing reality. In his script, he rarely resorts to outward conflict or drama; every tension felt comes from subtext or a sense of introspection. The resulting product is a film that's as genuine as they come.Mills also uses some unexpected narrative devices in the film, primarily in the form of Oliver's omniscient voiceovers set to various images. We enter deeper into his consciousness through the visual art that he creates in his day job. He talks a lot about history and what happiness and sadness looked like at different points over the last century. This drapes an additional layer of background around a story that feels timeless and not especially obligated to history. Yet there's something quite meaningful in the way Mills ties this story to context, letting us know in an overt but creative way that context does matter in understanding Oliver's and Hal's stories.At the same time, this is yet another component making synthesis of "Beginners" a tedious process. Mills' feature debut, "Thumbsucker," also struggled a bit with thematic identity and a cohesive through- line, so perhaps it's more of a conscious choice in his own presentation style, one that wishes to break us of the need for stories that hold our hand from point to point until we reach the waters of catharsis. In fact, at one point Oliver's mother (Mary Page Keller) tells young Oliver to go in his room and scream as a way of achieving "catharsis." Oliver comes out immediately saying he doesn't have to. While intended to show how all people process anger and grief differently, the same can be said of a film. Mills provides different ways for different people to process, and while it's messy and never hits the emotional swelling point of great films, it's sure to connect.~Steven CThanks for reading! Visit Movie Muse Reviews for more

Ewan McGregor plays a graphic artist in Los Angeles who enters into an uncertain romantic relationship with an actress while recalling the last few years taking care of his widower father, a man in his 70s who recently came out of the closet before being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Mike Mills wrote and directed this lovely drama, one with poignant passages and performances, though it's a mild picture that feels benign at its core. Mills has a keen eye for catching small but meaningful expressions and moments that linger just long enough on-screen to make an impression on us. He's clearly helped by his nimble editor, Olivier Bugge Coutte, but nothing can disguise the thinness of Mills' screenplay (it's lacking not just in overall material, but also in dramatic cohesiveness). Christopher Plummer is heartbreaking as McGregor's dying father; however, his relationships with both a younger boyfriend and a circle of older gay pals are sketchy (Plummer gets involved in gay causes and tests the bar scene, yet his friends come and go at whim--whenever Mills needs them). McGregor is very low-keyed here (it's his least-offensive performance), yet this extremely quiet approach doesn't do much for a film which is already photographed in subdued shades and with minimal music (and what there is of a music score, from Roger Neill, David Palmer and Brian Reitzell, is terrible). Worthwhile despite its faults, which includes an unnecessary reprise of fatherly smiles near the end. Plummer deservedly won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. **1/2 from ****

People in the future will look back on films like this that rate so well and think, "what the hell did people like about that?". It is mediocre, trivial, slight and these days almost a self-parody of the artsy type of movie with the plinky-plonky music and the scenes where everything is so subtle it forgets to actually happen.I like interesting stories. This is just a story. And I mean "just".The characters aren't all that interesting and what they are doing and feeling is not all that interesting either. This kind of cinema seems to want to tap into what it's like to be a human and to have complicated feelings and mixed up memories and it's just not very profound or special or enlightening and it definitely isn't very entertaining.Perhaps to like this kind of film depends on where you are with your own perceptions of the world or perhaps you just like having what you yourself feel, affirmed on screen and you see that as something that makes a film great, but I personally don't. I want some excitement, some interest, something I wasn't expecting, something to make me think or really feel, something profound or even something alien and unusual or eccentric, bombastic or beautiful. But this? This is pedestrian, lethargic, sometimes painful and ultimately just dull. Dull, normal, people with nothing really going on, just like nearly everyone you know. I don't want to go to the cinema to see or feel this. This is just life. I get it. I know it already. Give me some escapism please or at least some characters or a story better than this.