Beginners
AMC 3rd avenue, June 8, 2011
Movie #34 for 2011
Beginners proves that falling in love at 38 or 75 is just as intolerably sunshine-colored and soft-focused as when teenagers do it.
Oliver (EWAN McGREGOR, The Ghost Writer) can’t get it together romantically. His recently widowed father (CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER) has, at 75, begun to live as an openly gay man. When he gets terminal cancer, Oliver nurses him through, and when he dies, Oliver grieves. Not long after, he meets ANNA (MELANIE LAURENT, Inglorious Basterds) and embarks on his own romantic awakening. Vomit.
The film is saved from narrative mediocrity by a stylistic boldness, very good performances (especially Plummer and McGregor, pictured) and a handful of genuinely touching scenes between Oliver and his parents (his mother when he was a boy and his father now he is grown).
Given this, it's interesting that the main narrative focus is elsewhere - on a simplistic love affair between Oliver and Anna (which invites - and then suffers from - comparison to some parts of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). The film’s strengths are so peripheral to the core narrative, I wonder that writer/director MIKE MILLS (Thumbsucker) started there in the first, y’know, place.
While the narrative is not ambiguous in any way, interestingly the film does leave space for interpretation and projection. I thought that Oliver was perfectly comfortable with his father’s new boyfriend, my beloved thought he was homophobic. We can’t both be right, but I think we’re both not-wrong (Schrodinger’s Cat-style).
Also: the film is set in LA, but the one short scene in New York was totally filmed a block from my apartment!
