Movie Review: Beginners (2011)

It's a film about love, loss, life, family, friendships and it has a talking dog… Well, he sort of talks. Yes, Mike Mills' Beginners has all the stereotypical trappings of a drama meant to tug at your heart strings, tickle your funny bone and make you believe in the power of good. In this sense it isn't attempting to do much more than many films of its ilk. And to quickly nail down what makes it such a hit while others pale by comparison is impossible as a wide range of aspects contribute to its success, from the script, to the editing, to the actors and the direction. It really is a perfect storm of competence when relating to life's complications, ups and downs, laughs and loves.

Beginners opens with a montage of images narrated by the film's central character, Oliver (played with all the charm he can muster by Ewan McGregor), a commercial artist who's just lost his father (Christopher Plummer) to cancer at the age of 75. As these pictures flash before our eyes, bouncing back and forth between 1955 and 2003, the reason for each grows clearer and clearer. Made up of images from Oliver's life and others that simply define an era, in just a few short minutes you feel as if you've known Oliver and his parents for years.

Oliver's father came out of the closet as a gay man four years before his death, which also happened to be only days after the passing of his wife. Unbeknownst to Oliver, this change in lifestyle came as quite a shock, but the relationship between the two was strengthened by his father's honesty, his new found lust for life, and, not to forget, his much-younger boyfriend (played by one-time "ER" star Goran Visjnic). This man was not the father Oliver knew growing up and it created a relationship that both excited and scared him.

Meanwhile, in present day, Oliver is trying to pick up the pieces of his life as he mopes around town with his father's Jack Russell terrier, Arthur, always at his side, a dog that has quickly become the stereotypical "man's best friend" in Oliver's life. The two have one-sided conversations on a regular basis as Mills uses subtitles to give Arthur a "voice." Perhaps, as a dog owner myself (and, call me crazy, one that frequently talks to his dog), this was one aspect of the narrative that captured my attention.

We all know dogs can't talk, and when it comes to understanding what we're saying they average out at about 165 words, but while this piece of the story is funny, it's also an imaginative narrative trick. Mills uses this one simple tool to give us further insight into Oliver's thought process and his private decisions. So, while it may seem Oliver and Arthur are having a "conversation," Mills has simply come up with a way to give Oliver's inner-monologue an actual voice in the film. It's quite brilliant really.
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Director of Beginners mourns his parents with funny film

After the filmmaker Mike Mills lost his mother, his cancer-ridden 75-year-old father made an announcement: All his life, he’d been gay.

“Having this stuff happen was way more intense than making a movie about it,” laughs Mills, 45, writer-director of Beginners, a film-based on (but not an exact replica of) his experiences with rediscovering his father as he reinvented himself. “My worst fear is it’s a self-hating, narcissistic downward spiral, but my hope is that someone can take something from my nooks and crannies and find something that’s real for themselves.”

Inspired by the wry honesty of such artists as Leonard Cohen, Cat Power and Woody Allen, the film — which stars Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer — was written five months after Mills’s father passed away.

“After your second parent dies, you’re like, ‘Who the hell am I?’ You’re on fire with that question, and now it’s just you on the horizon — you’re next,” says Mills, who began his career making documentaries and music videos and directed the film Thumbsucker in 2005. “It really does cause this kind of crisis, but I’ve had enough therapy that I’ve become comfortable talking about myself.”

Mills not only wrote an autobiographical screenplay, but the graphic designer and commercial artist also created many of the film’s props (he made the complicated CD packaging that McGregor’s trying to sell to an uninterested band in the film). During draft after draft of his back-and-forth with Hollywood, his script became more personal as it began looking less likely to be made.

“People liked Thumbsucker, but it didn’t catapult my career and weirdly it made me put everything I love into this,” says Mills. “If this was going to be the last film I made, I wanted everything that felt special to me to be in the story.”

On set, McGregor and Plummer clicked like an actual family and Mills says it was difficult, at times, watching the Canadian icon bring back the charming and complicated character of his dad.

“I never looked at Christopher like my dad, but when the doctor says, ‘You don’t have to come in anymore,’ Ewan started crying and I see this teardrop hit the lens and think it’s me, but it’s the DP,” Mills says. “It wasn’t that it was my dad, it was that something real was happening. Christopher took my dad’s energy and externalized it.”

For Mills, making deeply personal art like his heroes is taxing, but the filmmaker says there’s no other way that he wants to work.

“When I read Ginsberg’s Howl or hear This American Life, I get chills because I know it comes from someone’s unique experience,” says Mills, who was approached by HBO to turn the subject of Beginners into a documentary series. “I told them, ‘What are we going to do, have my dad die every week?’ I’m ready to move on from this story, but this is the terrain I do like.”

Movie review: "Beginners" is a charming look at the anatomy of love

"Beginners" starts with 38-year-old Oliver Fields cleaning father Hal's home in the wake of his death.

There are garbage bags to fill, clothes to sort, meds to pour down the toilet.

There is also Arthur. The winning Jack Russell terrier (is there any other kind?) provides the surest punch lines in this shimmering gem of a romance — with plenty of ouchy laughs.

Opening on such a note of loss might set a lesser film on the glum path of mourning. And while there's plenty of melancholia, there is also sweet wonder and celebration in writer-director Mike Mills' semiautobiographical tale of a straight son coming to terms with his own love's possibilities after his father comes out of the closet.

"Beginners"

plumbs how we humans are shaped by our era. Oliver (Ewan McGregor) provides voice-over ruminations that say things like: "This is what love looked like in 1955" . . . "This is what smoking looked like" . . . "This is what the sky looked like in 2003," accompanied by the sort of toothy or blazing images advertising gladly ladles decade after decade.

The first date, 1955, was when Hal and Georgia got married. With a subtle smile on his lips and a ridiculously amusing penchant for bandanas tied round his neck, Christopher Plummer provides a touching portrait of sweet expectation as Hal, whose liberation comes at age 75. His wife of 44 years and Oliver's mother has been dead for six months.

He'd always known about his sexual identity, Hal says, and now he'd like to see what it would be like to be more than "theoretically gay."

Goran Visnjic of "E.R." portrays his lover, Andy. Mary Page Keller is alluring as Hal's rather neglected wife and Oliver's idiosyncratic mother. In flashbacks, we see she made her only child a companion and an audience.

The year 2003 is when, two months after Hal's passing, a very blue Oliver meets Anna (Melanie Laurent) at a party. She is French, an actress and a citizen more often than not of hotel rooms. She takes Oliver back to hers, and they begin a minuet of desire and wariness.

A jazz-bluesy score — Hoagy Car- michael, Jelly Roll Morton — gives Anna and Oliver's courtship a hint of Woody Allen circa "Manhattan" and "Annie Hall." But the mood, just as rewarding, is more somber. After all, "Beginners" is steeped in a different era of visual playfulness and partakes of the philosophical tradition of critical theory and some of its go-to thinkers Michel Foucault and the Jacques — Derrida and Lacan.

In spite of that rarified pedigree, "Beginners" is a warm affair.

Mills has described his film as a contrast in obstacles: the cultural, external ones that

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