Film Reviews

Beginners

• Rating:
• Director: Mike Mills
• Starring: Christopher Plummer
• Details: US / 105mins (15A).

Director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker) delivers a touching account of what happened when his father told him some news. Maybe the story is too personal to allow Mills to think outside the box (the same happened to John Hughes in She's Having A Baby) but Beginners sometimes fails to hit the spot.
We first meet McGregor's Oliver as he tosses his father's belongings into the trash. Through narration and a quick flashback, we learn that the day Oliver's father, Hal (Plummer), told him he had cancer, he also told him that he's gay despite being married to Oliver's mother, Georgia (Mary Page Keller), for fifty-odd years. Not only that, Hal has a young lover in Andy (Visnjic). Oliver is in a daze and he's not ready to bump into what could be the love of his life: Anna (Laurent). Their meet-cute is a fancy dress party where he's come as Freud and she…well, we don't know what she is as she can't speak because of laryngitis and can only communicate through written messages. What we can gather is that she is an actress holed up in an empty hotel, wiling away the days until she's needed on set.
A movie that bobbles along at its own pace (slow), Mills has a talent for sucking the audience into the lives of the characters. Then the director goes about killing that by inserting distracting images. When told his father has a tumour the size of a quarter, a quarter pops up on screen; interesting in that it visualises how the mind works (think 'bedside lamp' - what do you see in your mind's eye?) but it has the knack of pulling you out of the moment and reminding you that you are watching a movie. Never a good idea when your story deals with death and loneliness. The flashbacks to his mother, with whom he had a close relationship with despite her odd behaviour (it's as if she was lifted from a Wes Anderson movie), feel like from a different film entirely.
Generally the relationships on show - Oliver and Anna, Oliver and his mother, Oliver and his friends, Oliver and his dog (whose thoughts can be read via subtitles), Hal and Andy - are wishy-washy and standoffish but the relationship between Oliver and Hal is a touching one. Avoiding laying on the waterworks and without resorting to cliché, the father-son story is the strongest here. Plummer and McGregor have dialogue but it's when they don't speak that their scenes work best.
Maybe Mills could have told Hal's story - a new lease of life at 75 which is then tragically cut short - or maybe he could have delved a little further into Oliver's - a fear of being alone stops him from sharing his life with anyone - but neither is given the full gun.
Although sweet, and enjoyable, Beginners just isn't a stayer.

Review by Gavin Burke