Beginners (2011), written and directed by Mike Mills, is at its most effective when portraying the tender relationship between father and son. In the aftermath of his father Hal’s (Christopher Plummer) death after a long battle with illness, graphic designer son Oliver (Ewan McGregor), who has been drifting rather aimlessly through life, must take a positive step forward, as well as take ownership of his father’s dog.
Mills, drawing on personal reflections from his own father’s life, occasionally settles for poetic-observation mode through Oliver’s intermittent narration. These moments, weighted with visual and verbal abstractions, make for neat diversions but don’t necessarily resonate with emotional power. Mills intertwines Oliver’s new phase with the last years of his father’s life, a time complicated by Hal’s revelation, after decades of marriage, that he’s actually gay.
Unfortunately the present sees Oliver lumbered with an uninteresting love interest in the badly out-of-place Melanie Laurent whose miscasting feels like an affectation echoing an annoying recent Hollywood trend (What? Marion Cotillard wasn’t available?). Her presence as actress Anna feels insubstantial, providing only the impetus to coax Oliver out of his aloneness without ever putting forward a convincing case for why she might be ‘the one’.
To his credit Mills doesn’t pursue an easy escape route through sentimentality. The complications created by Oliver and Anna’s fast-tracked romance are depicted with sobering deference to the innate complications that arise once the first flush of romance fades. But ultimately Beginners’ real fibre comes from the increasingly poignant interaction between McGregor and Plummer, both of whom give strong performances. The subtitled ‘thoughts’ of the dog are a novel idea and funny the first and second time, but fall a little flat thereafter.
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