What would you do if your father came up to you one day wearing a purple sweater and told you that he was gay? Maybe, just maybe, as Beginners tells us, it’d help you learn how to live and love.
Oliver (Ewan McGregor) is a visual artist/designer of sorts. The film opens with him living a dull life alone in a small, depressing apartment, coming to terms with the death of his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer). Hal had been married to Oliver’s mother, Georgia (Mary Page Keller), for 44 years, but after her death, he came out of the closet and found a much younger boyfriend, Andy (Goran Visnjic). Before then, Oliver’s relationships had always failed—something he blames on the loveless marriage between his parents. But Hal’s finding love for the first time gradually turns Oliver’s views on relationships around. That’s when he meets a French actress named Anna (Melanie Laurent).
Flitting between comedy and tedium, the film is nothing short of memorable. Its signature device is Oliver’s fourth-wall breaking narration. At several junctures in the film, a series of still images and brief clips roll past as Oliver talks about people, periods of time, pets, presidents, the sky and the stars. His lines are spoken straight, but there is an underlying, comical whimsy to them. Beginners does threaten to become a “nothing happens” sort of indie film, but those typical long periods of silence and inactivity are used sparingly enough that we see them as exploratory and reflective, not boring.
McGregor and Laurent are fantastic in their roles and in their interaction with each other. Not since Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunset has an onscreen couple been so naturalistically depicted (the American-French connection also brings back memories). Plummer, too, is wonderful as the out-of-the-closet Hal. He is reserved (the only flamboyant flourishes come from his wardrobe) and that says something about the whole gay element in the film. While it’s based on director Mills’ own story about his father—and it’s no doubt one of the most attention grabbing aspects of the film—Hal’s homosexuality doesn’t play as big a part as perhaps you'd expect (didn’t spare it the R21 rating though). Beginners is all about Oliver and his relationships—with his father, his friends, his lover, his clients and his deep, philosophical dog (we "hear" it through subtitles)—and it’s a brilliant bit of thought-provoking filmmaking that will stay with you long after you go home.