Beginners, así se siente el amor

I got the chance to attend a sneak peek of director, Mike Mills', latest film last night at one of the Reel Affirmations film festival's monthly screenings. I like Mills' films. They've got a moody, tortured aesthetic, and this one is no different. The story is primarily about the relationship between a man, Oliver (Ewan McGregor), and his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer). When Hal dies, Oliver is left to contemplate his life, their relationship, and all the poor choices each of them had made up until this point. We see the world through Oliver's eyes, and so the whole film is suffused with an overall tone of deep sadness. He can't seem to make any of his romantic relationships work, but then he's never really had any good role models. You see, after the death of his mother four years prior, Hal finally came out to his son as gay—at the ripe age of seventy-five. It's a very touching, and lightly sweet moment. Oliver is happy that his father hasn't given up on life, and is finally pursuing true love, but he just can't forget the years of isolation and loneliness his mother went through. Commence the sad wallowing.

Of course, all this changes when Oliver meets an alluring, winsome French girl (Melanie Laurent). Anna is an actress, and she's just about as bad at relationships as Oliver. They don't know much about each other, but they're both beautiful, damaged souls, so they get on like a house on fire. And somehow, Oliver is thinking less and less about his parents. Those ladies can be mighty distracting! But, not distracting enough to totally conceal either of these attractive kids' inherent personality flaws. But they're pretty fetching while they're working out their demons!

This is a wonderful film. It really captures the deep emotions people feel for each other, and even lets the audience feel some of them for themselves. There were definitely moments during the screening that had people surreptitiously wiping tears from the corners of their eyes. But, it's also sexy and funny too. We get to enjoy Oliver and Anna's uncertain flirtation. And, we also get to savor Hal's belated (but not too late!) blossoming. He's as giddy and nervous as a school-girl at her first dance, but he ultimately takes to his new life like a fish to water, even as late to the game as he is. This movie is a real crowd pleaser, and it's one that just about everyone will enjoy. The pacing is deliberate and solemn, but the story sucks you in enough that you barely notice. You can even bring a date to this one. It's not one to miss.

That's what I took with me and stayed with me. The humanity in Ewan MacGregor's eyes. Sadness and joy unmistakable in its deepness and its pungent recognition. Christopher Plummer is superb as the 75 year old who confesses to his son, he's been gay all his life and after the death of his wife, a sublime Mary Page Keller, he allows that side of his nature to take off and experiment, for the first time in his life, in an honest loving relationship with another man, the odd and lovely Goran Visnjic. As if this wasn't enough, a dog. An extraordinary creature who carries as much humanity as its human counterparts. Melanie Laurent adds an extra pinch of sexual sympathy. "Beginners" will play beautifully on the small screen so I predict a long life for this unexpected treat.

Greetings again from the darkness. This is a terrific little art-house character study with comedic elements, fine acting and superb writing. Mike Mills is responsible and he was also the writer and director on another excellent little movie from about 5 years ago called Thumbsucker. When I say little movie, I mean intimate and poignant with a nominal budget.

Three time periods are presented in overlapping form to an effective end. One period shows us Oliver (Ewan McGregor) as a young kid interacting with his mother (Mary Page Keller). Another period shows Oliver's father Hal (Christopher Plummer) confessing to him that he is gay (this is a few months after the mother/wife dies). The third period has Oliver trying to forge a relationship with Anna (Melanie Laurent) whom he met at a costume party.

While that may sound like a simple set-up, I assure you that the complications created by these characters is both realistic and head-spinning. It turns out Hal knew he was gay prior to marrying Oliver's mother, but claims she promised to "fix" him. Once he proclaims his gayness, Hal jumps in with both feet to all causes gay. He thoroughly enjoys himself and even meets a new, younger lover. And just when he admits to joy, inoperable cancer is discovered in Hal's lungs. This begins the second major secret of his life.

The scenes from Oliver's childhood provide crucial evidence on why he is so solemn and afraid of relationships. He suffers just as his mother did. Things begin to shift for him when, dressed as Freud, his party sofa becomes occupied by Anna - a beautiful, alluring French actress who, it turns out, is just as messed up emotionally as is Oliver. They make the perfect threesome ... including Arthur, Hal's Jack Terrier, who speaking through subtitles, lets us know when things are OK or not. Arthur takes a great deal of the heaviness away.

There are many elements of this film that I really like. The houses of both Hal and Oliver are full of as much personality as either of the characters. The look and pace of the film is meticulous and steady given the material. It seems to be naturally lighted from windows and interior sconces. Nothing even comes close to looking like a Hollywood set.

Ewan McGregor plays his part very close to the vest and conveys the pain and uncertainty that Oliver has learned over the years. His defenses are up! Melanie Laurent was my favorite part of Inglourious Basterds (she was the cinema owner on a mission) and here she offers both hopefulness and melancholy. To me, the heart of the film is Christopher Plummer's performance. He portrays an elderly gay man with grace and then takes it to another level in his "sick" scenes. He is a wise man who may or may not understand how selfish he was, but is intent on showing Oliver that it's never to late to be a "beginner" in love.

Mike Mills' 2005 debut Thumbsucker is a film whose quirky charm was completely lost on me, but where that film was drenched in artificiality, he somehow turned that charm into something grounded and serene with his sophomore feature Beginners. This is a movie that honestly transcends words, for me. The kind of impact it had on me will never be able to be described, but it's one that touched me at my soul and deeply moved me in a profound way. The film is built around this message from Mills' personal life that you have the capacity to assess your situation at any point in life and make a change for the better. However, in the most un-Hollywood sense, Mills never beats you over the head with the message or panders to it's audience; it just exists in it's own world and you can embrace it or not, but the film doesn't exist solely for that reason. It may not particularly exist for any reason, it just exists and for me, that was all it needed to do to hit me right in the heart.

In taking on a subject matter as emotionally strong as this (a father coming out of the closet at a late age and then being diagnosed with terminal cancer), Mills was open to a plethora of moments for overbearing melodrama to bring the audience to tears, but he never embraces this in a traditional way at all. He treats the subject with this delicate, grounded approach that feels fully original and honestly quite daring in it's subtlety, leading to an experience much more effective than if he had gone the traditional route. His background in graphic design leads to some wonderfully charming editing techniques and Woody Allen circa Annie Hall uniqueness in the story structure, but it never overpowers the center that is ultimately a charming, emotional and entirely natural character study. The study of a young man finally seeing who his father is, contrasted with his first experience in true love. All three of the central characters charmed me off my feet, but Mills creates genuine, flawed and sometimes annoying human beings out of all of them.

Once again, as with everything else in the film, he transcends the general approach and just creates these full, real human beings. Oliver and Anna instantly became one of my favorite couples in the history of cinema, with the incomparable chemistry between Ewan McGregor and Melanie Laurent, and Hal reminded me so much of my grandfather it really brought me to tears several times. Mills plays everything in an understated way, but by doing this he allows the film to really get under your skin and sink in, a much more effective technique than just hitting you on the surface over and over again. The performances by all three are truly out of this world.

I find McGregor to be a great talent who rarely gets the opportunity to demonstrate that, but this character allows him to give his finest performance to date. He is so grounded and honest in his portrayal, bringing comedy both light and dark along with genuine emotion that sunk into me deeply over and over again. I related to his faults and his gifts and McGregor really made me feel like I understood this guy through and through. Laurent is a delight and makes you fall in love with her almost instantly; again I have to mention the overwhelming chemistry that the two of these had. Before we even got a chance to fully comprehend their relationship, I was in tears by the simple act of them holding hands with one another. Mills and Laurent take a character that could have been conventional and tossed aside for the father-son dynamic and make a fully-fleshed person out of her, complete with her own demons and turmoil and I fell in love with her all the way.

Then comes Christopher Plummer as Oliver's father, who is everything you could want from this guy; charming, chaotic, filled with life and regret. He's absolutely enchanting and devastating simultaneously, a guy that makes you want to live your life to fullest potential. In fact, enchanting is a word that is perfect for the film as a whole. Beyond the authenticity and the emotional impact that it had on me (which is not small by any notion), the film truly seems to dance at times and it's in those moments that I felt something...beautiful and serene beyond anything that words could hope to encapsulate. This movie transcended everything for me.

Beginners is a great film that will not satisfy a few viewers, as evidenced by other comments here. First, here's what it will not do: it will not feed you a linear story with a single, simple plot. The beauty of this film is in its complexity, which faithfully reflects the dynamics of real life. There are flashbacks. There is highly cinematic use of material that is intended to suggest mood, rather than deliver it with dead dialog. Yes, the dog gets a few subtitles, highly credible for anyone who has ever owned a dog. There is even a brief moment in which solid colors flash on the screen, and we occasionally visit the protagonist's revealing sketches. There is a message in all of this that some will not appreciate. Several stories are magically woven together: the son's difficulty in maintaining a relationship, the girlfriend's own hesitation to commit to one place and one person, the mother's endurance of a marriage that worked on only one level, the father's adjustment to his new gay life, and his boyfriend's worries that he is not accepted because he is gay. Whew! That's a lot to cram into one story, but it works remarkably well and we see in the end that all the characters were what the title said, Beginners.