Cinema 2011 #75: Beginners

Beginners, the story of a man finding new beginnings in his life after unexpected changes, bereavement and new love, is the second feature from director Mike Mills, a man so unattainably hip that the French band Air, for whom he’s directed numerous music videos, named a track on one of their albums after him.

Mills’ film is a semi-autobiographical story revolving around Ewan McGregor’s Oliver, weighed down by grief following the death of his father Hal (Christopher Plummer), from lung cancer at 80 years of age, five years after Hal revealed himself to be gay. Still bereft and caring for his father’s Jack Russell terrier, who poses subtitled questions throughout, Oliver may just find solace in the shape of French actress Anna, herself no stranger to daddy issues. But this relationship forces him to confront deeper issues concerning the very nature of love, from his parent’s marriage in the 1970s through to his father’s short-lived experiences in the gay community and his romance with Goran Visnjic’s Andy. 

His insistence on reading every script from Frasier was growing tiresome

An expected oh-so-cool indie vibe dominates throughout this film, too offbeat to be a drama, too slow to be a comedy, and too knowingly quirky to be affecting. While the acting is universally appealing, with Plummer particularly showing every other senior in Hollywood how to end on a serious high, the story feels somewhat contrived and simple. We have no sense that Oliver is shocked by his father’s declaration of hidden homosexuality, and Mélanie Laurent, while charming as Anna, gets ultimately lost under a character that’s pretty kooky-cutter female. Oliver’s childhood flashbacks to his deceased mother, Mary Page Keller, give the film great energy, but there is a sense that the more interesting story of the four leads lay with her devotion to a man she doesn’t love.

Coming off as it as a slightly overlong mediation into the popular malaise of modern love, Beginners is best enjoyed an indie drama with weighty intentions that just doesn’t know where its going. Stylistically rich with its series of pleasant, if increasingly meaningless, vignettes into societal change through the medium of flashing images and pictures, it seems a somewhat wasted opportunity.

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Released Nationwide: July 22nd

Runtime: 104 mins

Certificate: 15a