Almost from the start, director Mike Mills' dramedy Beginners reminds one of the earlier works of the great Woody Allen: a neurotic protagonist facing his emotional and romantic issues head-on, an alluring and quirky love interest who serves as a true foil for the hero's neuroses, a non-linear method of storytelling meant to parallel events of past and present. There's even a jazz/blues fusion-style score reminiscent of Allen's warm usage of Gershwin to blend in with the introspective nature of the story and characters.
And while Beginners' main character may not be a nebbishy Jewish writer/comedian/academic-- but rather a withdrawn, pseudo-hipster graphic artist who talks to his dog-- there's still that classic sense of self-performed psychoanalysis and romantic discovery that's unmistakable, akin to the unconventional intimacy of Annie Hall and Manhattan.
Los Angeles graphic designer Oliver (Ewan McGregor) has recently inherited the house of his father Hal (Christopher Plummer), who had passed away months earlier from Stage IV lung cancer. Throughout a series a flashbacks, it's revealed that a couple years earlier, the 75-year-old Hal had come out of the closet as a gay man after the death of his wife of five decades. Feeling liberated by the ability to explore a facet of his life he was forced to hide for decades, Hal gains a circle of friends in the gay community, and starts a relationship with the younger Andy (Goran Visnijc).
However, it's discovered that Hal is also suffering from Stage IV lung cancer, and is eventually put into home hospice care after chemo treatments become moot. Though he's happy for his father, Oliver's fragmented experiences with love (including his witnessing of his parents' woefully unhappy marriage) doesn't bode well for his emotional state. After his father's death, a depressed Oliver hooks up with Anna (Mélanie Laurent), a French actress from New York living in hotel rooms while attempting auditions in Hollywood, and someone with daddy issues of her own.
Unsure of whether or not he can start fresh with romance like his father before him, Oliver reexamines his life and views on love.
Despite the time-hopping, sentimental nature of Beginners, there's nothing truly pretentious or overwrought about it. In fact, the jumbled chronology helps establish a parallel between the struggles of father and son: both men experienced a period of heartache in regards to true romance, with Hal forced to live a loveless marriage due to his true sexuality, and Oliver never being able to keep a steady relationship because of his lack of confidence.
As such, we're treated to a pair of terrific performances from Plummer and McGregor. Plummer once again proves why he's been such a consistently acclaimed thespian for the last five and a half decades, with a bright, sweet, and empowering performance of a man who embraces his true self late in life, optimistic and bold in the face of impending death.
McGregor does a superb job as the perpetually unlucky-in-love artist caring for his ailing father, bogged down by an existential crisis that derails his ability to find love in a healthy manner. It doesn't help that his parents didn't really serve as a shining example of familial stability, and flashbacks show that young Oliver is clearly aware of how unhappy and neglected his mother (a charmingly idiosyncratic Mary Page Keller) feels in her marriage.
His depression manifests itself in his work and social lives. When he's commissioned to design band portraits on the album art for an indie rock group called The Sads, he instead crafts a melancholic three-foot-long opus he calls "The History of Sadness". When he goes to a costume party with his friends, he tellingly dresses up as Sigmund Freud, and gives mock psychoanalysis to other partiers when it's clearly obvious that he's the one who needs to be laying on that couch instead.
One such partier who receives his "therapy" and his attention is Laurent (so good in Inglourious Basterds two years ago, and doing well with what she's given here) as a Parisian acting hopeful whose initial meeting with Oliver is marred by her being afflicted with laryngitis. The two communicate (at first) by him talking and her writing on a notepad. The two are instantly smitten with each other, but also wary of each other. Both are afraid of the other flaking out on their fledgling romance, and as Oliver eventually recounts the pain of his loving but unstable relationship with his late father, it hits too close to home for Anna.
But Beginners is not all gloom. Mills sprinkles in an ample amount of cheer and clever humor, whether it's when Oliver "chats" with his Jack Russell terrier (who seemingly "talks back" via subtitles that only the audience and, apparently, Oliver can understand), or when Oliver engages in postmodernist graffiti vandalism with his coworkers.
But more than anything else, Beginners is primarily a story about hope. Mills based the story on his own father coming out of the closet in his seventies, and a good chunk of the film's optimism and authenticity comes from that first-hand source of emotion and experience. A life-affirming story of self-discovery whose large thematic scope belies its outward appearance of a "small movie" feel, Beginners is a celebration of life, death, and the sweet beauty found in between.
Letter Grade: "A-"
No comments:
Post a Comment