A heartfelt tale that shows it's never too late to start again.
Inspired by his father’s coming out at the age of 75, Mike Mills (Thumbsucker) writes and directs Beginners, a film that fuses paternal eulogy and death as a midlife crisis catalyst. Ewan McGregor (The Ghost Writer) plays Oliver, Mills’ cinematic alter ego, as he morns for his father’s death, unearthing his own latent existential issues. Beginners is a heartfelt film, with its real-life inspiration adding emotional resonance. Nonetheless, the film often finds itself treading familiar ground, preventing it from truly resonating.
Built on a series of flashbacks and cleverly edited montages, Beginners documents the aftermath of Hal’s death, five years after his coming out as a gay man. The flashback reveals an enthusiastic and vibrant senior who has decided to experiment and perform according to his sexuality, embracing the gay scene with its (stereotype-drawn) house music and pink feather boas. Hal’s death reveals Oliver’s own existential shortcomings as he retrospectively celebrates his father’s life. Months later, Oliver meets Anna, a French actress who struggles from displacement and hotel fatigue. Needless to say, Anna’s own crisis and father issues bind these two lost souls together.
Christopher Plummer (The Sound of Music, David Fincher’s upcoming The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) in a supporting role is the standout, able to harness empathy as he slowly reveals a layered character on a journey of self-discovery. His absence lingers throughout the film, emphasizing Plummer’s charisma and highlighting the importance of Hal in Oliver’s existential catharsi
The film revolves around Oliver, reaffirming that Beginners is not a homosexual film nor does it pretend to be one – it’s a personal tribute to a father who just happened to be gay. That said, Hal’s homosexual curiosity for his newly embraced sexuality elevates poignant arcs that could have been better navigated and fleshed out, notably: Hal’s lamentation of the homosexual subculture’s ageism to his highly liberal open relationship with his young lover.
The film’s main emotional resonance stems from the father son relationship between Hal and Oliver, emphasizing Anna as the weakest link in Beginners. Despite doing her best with an underwritten role, Melanie Laurent’s (Inglorious Basterds) Anna comes off as a cursory character, only in the film to reestablish traditional gender expectations. Oliver and Anna’s relationship here draws from familiar romance cues: from their costume party meet-cute (Oliver dressed ironically as Freud) to Anna’s own father issues – it’s a relationship that seems more like an afterthought.
If the film were from Hal’s perspective, Beginners would have been a very different film. It would have courted issues stemming from a heterosexual director, but nevertheless, it could have been a curious in-depth foray into the homosexual senior experience. But of course, this film is not that. Beginners is a very personal film, whose subjectivity prevented it from exploring other avenues of storytelling. As it is, it’s an earnest and respectable eulogy. But if looked at from an objective lens, it could have been a better film if Hal was more to the fore.
Reynald Castaneda