THE SADS: a review of "Beginners"

“BEGINNERS”
Written and Directed by Mike Mills
***1/2 (three and a half stars)

How is it that we are the people we are? How are our personalities formed? Are they learned or innate or somehow mysteriously intertwined and brought into the fullness of life due to our experiences and how we perceive and react to them?

Dear readers, I am a fairly melancholic person. I have absolutely no idea why or how I am the way I am, especially as those qualities do not seem to exist inside of my parents, but throughout the trajectory of my life, I have always felt a certain wistful sadness. That does not mean that I feel that there is a black cloud constantly over my head threatening to drench me with life’s rainfall. Quite the contrary, there is much to life that makes me deliriously happy and to those that know me, I can often be found laughing often and loudly. But still, there is this feeling I have that sits at the center of my spirit that makes me aware of things typically not turning out in the most desired ways and that feeling of disappointment is always present, even at its smallest.

“Beginners,” the new film from Writer/Director Mike Mills taps into that precise level of sadness in a film I found to be beautifully melancholic and miraculously, not depressing in the least. It is a quiet, languid, deliberately paced experience that deftly illustrates how we, as human beings, all exist symbiotically through the sameness of our life’s experiences yet we all seem to travel alone together in pursuit of connection and understanding. And if there’s a nice animal, let’s say a Jack Russell terrier to act as our faithful, unconditionally loving cohort along the way, then we are the better for it.

Ewan McGregor stars in one of his most accomplished, engaging and emotionally bare performances as Oliver, an artist, who in the year 2003, found his life at a peculiar crossroads. After enduring the passing of his Mother, Georgia (a great Mary Page Keller), Oliver’s Father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), at the age of 75 and 45 years of marriage, comes out as a gay man. Within four years of that seismic revelation, Oliver is faced with death again as Hal dies after a lengthy battle with cancer.

Oliver, consumed with grief, withdraws from his friends and co-workers, and dutifully attends to his Hal’s belongings, which includes inheriting his dog Arthur (played winningly and with occasional subtitled captions by the dog Cosmo). One evening, after being coerced by friends to accompany them to a costume party, Oliver (with the very needy Arthur in tow), meets Anna (a stunning Melanie Laurent), a French actress with whom Oliver soon begins a new love affair.

In some ways, “Beginners” could serve as a somewhat less esoteric companion piece to Terrence Malick’s astonishing “The Tree Of Life,” as Mills also weaves huge themes about our collective humanity on Earth throughout an intensely personal, non-linear designed film. As Oliver copes with Hal’s death and attempts to tentatively forge onwards into a relationship with Anna, the film flies backwards and forwards in time and memories much like how we, the audience, performs each day of our lives. We are witness to aspects of Oliver’s childhood, memories of his parents’ marriage, his relationship with his Mother, the stages of Hal’s illness and the tenderly awkward relationship that existed during the last years of Hal’s life as he embraced his life as a homosexual male, member of the homosexual community and began a relationship with the much younger Alex (Goran Visnjic from television’s “ER”).

What makes all of these episodes so crucial to the overall effectiveness of “Beginners,” is how we can see how memory is completely subjective and how our memories can never fully inform us as much as we think they should. Oliver exists with a fear of commitment that continues to manifest itself through enduring a series of failed relationships. On one hand, we can easily understand why his views of commitment are they way they are as his memories of his parent’s marriage inform him, and the audience, that although they remained a couple for 45 years, the marriage itself was decidedly chilly and seemingly not nearly as romantic as the relationship Hal eventually shared with Alex.

Even Oliver’s relationship with Georgia feels strained as his Mother strikes a somewhat inscrutable figure. She’s loving yet distant. Playful yet prickly. Permissive yet aloof and seemingly as uninterested in her son’s emotional development as Hal, who is depicted in Oliver’s memories as a tall man with his back always facing Oliver’s eyes. Oliver is a product of an environment that shows commitment as being fueled by various degrees of dissatisfaction and emotional emptiness, so no wonder why he is terrified of openening his heart so completely to another. Why spend 45 years of your life with someone when you never loved them and denied the truth of yourself in the process? But are his memories the fullness of truth?

The core of “Beginners,” is indeed Oliver’s adult relationship with Hal, which Mills presents so lovingly yet without any maudlin shading, prefabricated histrionics, or any clichéd homilies. Hal, now at his own life’s crucial stage, begins to transform himself into the man he has always known himself to be but due to the times in which he lived and grew, was unable to. Hal, witnessing his son’s shortcomings, tries to subtly imprint his greatest teachings on how life can be lived, ironically just at the point where his body begins to fail him.

As I watched “Beginners,” I felt that pall of melancholy wash over me but it never engulfed me. I ached for these characters but never fell into any sense of despair. These emotions were simply the humane feelings of just wanting people to discover and attain their own personal levels of happiness, whatever they may happen to be and I greatly appreciated how Mills matter-of-factly depicted the ways we all trip ourselves and upend our own happiness. Yes, I regarded the sadness of Hal’s life, a man knowing from the age of 13 that he was gay, and not ever feeling able to express the fullness of himself due to circumstances not of his making. Yet, this is no pity party. His life is what it is and he moves ahead as best as he is able and armed with a newfound sense of purpose that he hopes his son can gain from. How touching is was to see how near the end of his life how much he embraced. Not only his identity but whatever life he had remaining. Hal did not want to waste even one more minute or moment.

Christopher Plummer’s performance is supremely enchanting. I enjoyed how he injected a childlike sense of wonder within his new relationships within the gay community and even smaller, yet no less significant pleasures of literature, drink and even his new discovery of…house music. But, this was not presented as cutesy. Just a man determined to not allow his final years to be lived in vain, a lesson he attempts to instill within Oliver, who continues to struggle emotionally as he and Anna grow closer.

Every time Melanie Laurent appeared on screen, I could not take my eyes off of her. Her face contained oceans of expressions and moods, clearly evident in her first several sections of scenes with McGregor, as her character is suffering from laryngitis and is unable to speak. It is obvious to me why and how Oliver could fall for her so instantly. She is so nuanced, her movements, vocal inflections and character’s inner qualities are so minutely observed that she never once strikes a false note...even when she says not a word. To think that this is the same actress who commanded the screen with mountainous dialogue in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” (2009)! I am hoping for Ms. Laurent to find herself overrun with offers from strong filmmakers for she is indeed that talented and deserves to have her skills shown often.

Granted, “Beginners,” like the films of Sofia Coppola, may try the patience of audience members as it is a slow moving film and nothing really happens. But I hope that does not discourage any of you from seeing this movie as “Beginners” is not a film about what happens. It is a film that gracefully, poignantly and with many wry slices of humor shows us how and why we all need each other and despite how our personalities are formed, there is always room to change.

“Beginners” is a film that is about that very moment of change and the painful steps sometimes taken to bring that change into complete fruition because by the nature of beginning, something, sometimes invariably has to end. With Hal, his life fully begins as it is about to close permanently. Oliver’s life, hopefully with Anna, cannot fully form without finally discarding the sad life and perceptions he has claimed for himself. Mills, through his film, show how the process of change can be very uncomfortable even when one’s present situation is not anything to write home about. Oliver may be lonely and unfulfilled but it is the only life he knows and deviation from that fuels his fear of opening up fully. Mike Mills is in tune with that confusion so empathetically and without judgment.

Sometimes, it feels pretty good to engage and lose yourself in the waters of melancholy. “Beginners” is like a long, sweet, sad, soulful sigh and it is one Mike Mills earnestly wishes to share with us.