I finally saw it - the film "Beginners", just in time to beat the crowd that has been just finishing up seeing Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” – the latest melodrama from the director who refuses to do any main stream blockbusters and staying true to the old school cinematography. (The show has been solidly sold out for the past two weeks in DC….)
First and foremost – my advice to all – never go to the movies with high expectations. The more you build up your expectations to see a certain movie, the most likely you’d be disappointed. Even the greatest film critics sometimes do not do the right justice. After all, it’s all based on a personal perception and opinion.
This is exactly what happened to my experience with Beginners – from the filmmaker, artist and graphic designer Mike Mills, who, as I understand, captured a bit of his personal life and experience.
Mills’ main character Oliver, portrayed by brilliant diversified Irish actor Ewan McGregor, is a graphic designer, who inherits a ‘talking’ dog after his father Hal (portrayed by no less brilliant Christopher Plummer) passes away. And this is how the film starts – with Oliver packing up his dad’s stuff after the funeral and from the very beginning of the movie – the melancholic, sad mood is set.
This is a story about a man who comes to terms of his father coming out of a closet at age 70-something and declaring that he has been gay all his life, which makes the son to re-think and re-call bits and pieces of his childhood and realize how sad and lonely (and why) his mother was. Oliver keeps coming back to the times when there were just two of them – him and his mother – going about daily activities. His father didn’t seem to be in the picture at all, neither he was in the picture of his marriage relationship, although he does confess to Oliver just before he dies that his mother was very much aware of his orientation and lifestyle and that she wanted to marry him anyway (and she wanted to change him.) That didn’t happen, of course. Once a gay – always a gay. At least that’s how I view homosexualism.
Throughout the whole movie Oliver recalls the last few years of his father ‘new’ life – his father’s relationship with a much younger boyfriend and his father’s being active on a cultural, political and social gay scene. But this is not the part that was sad in the movie. It’s Oliver’s personal life that was sad. It was empty, it was ‘gray’ and it was boring.
It seemed that Oliver long lost desire and interest in his graphic design work. Oliver had no personal life. And he hardly had any friends. So, it was just about time that Anna (portrayed by a French actress Melanie Laurent (best known for her fantastic portrayal of a Jewish girl in Inglourious Basterds).
At a costume party, Oliver, who has been basically dragged out of his volunteering confinement by his friend, meets a French actress, who is only in Los Angeles for a while. As much as I wanted to like her character – I didn’t. Even though she seemed to shake Oliver out of his sadness, who falls in love with her and becomes dependant on her presence, she turns out to be sadder than Oliver.
Her lifestyle that keeps her from having her own home and family takes her from one hotel to another, from one city – to another. At the end, she craves more love, attention and sense of belonging than does Oliver. And that’s twice as sad – two sad characters who can’t find satisfaction from life and whose families are not there to support them and provide that “family” comfort they both crave for.
I think the director just wanted to show the life that is not about gay or straight, but show the life that is rather about the emotional risks one must take for love. It’s a movie about sacrifices one need to take to find not his own happiness and but make happy the others.
A lesson learned – one should take responsibility for his/her own happiness. It does not depend on anyone but oneself. Parents, relationships, friends – is only a beneficial addition to the state of happiness, but their mere presence is not the answer to his/her own happiness.
One more thing to mention – the film is not exciting, per say, or filled with much action and effects. It’s not that kind of a movie. It’s a movie about life as it can be – with long pauses, eye stares, and still shots of the surroundings…
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, Melanie Laurent, Goran Visnjic, Kai Lennox
Director/screenwriter: Mike Mills
104 minutes
Watch the trailer:
More about the film:
Check out: Director Mike Mills gives a tour of the LA spots that ended up in his film Beginners.
In Beginners, the dog Arthur and the human Oliver create an emotional bond that echoes back all the way to Homer.
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