Beginners
Deeply moving and sad, yet incredibly fun to watch, Mike Mills’ Beginners is the work of a filmmaker who is not afraid to test the limits of his medium.
Nearly a decade ago, Mills tricked hundreds of moviegoers, myself among them. Less than 60 seconds after the theater’s lights went down I was hooked, marveling at how a movie trailer had so perfectly and stylishly evoked the ennui, monotony, and enduring hopefulness of a young man working a soul-numbing office job in a skyscraper. Then I learned that this was not a trailer but a commercial.
Mills made a name for himself directing commercials and music videos, and earned critical acclaim for his 2005 feature Thumbsucker. His latest film unfolds over 104 minutes, not 60 seconds, but it uses every moment of screen time to create a visceral mood and add depth to a rich storyline that veers between autobiography, comedy, subtly-crafted political message, and romance. Mills manages all of this while keeping each scene vivacious and entertaining.
In Beginners, Oliver (Ewan McGregor) meets an irreverent and beautiful actress named Anna (Mélanie Laurent) just months after his father Hal (Christopher Plummer) has passed away from cancer. Hal came out of the closet at age 75, after 45 years of marriage. The final five years of his life were a feverish pursuit of new adventures – dating, hobbies, and a richer relationship with his son. As Oliver begins to fall for Anna and their relationship develops, memories of Hal inform his experience of life and love. The film weaves back and forth between different periods of Oliver’s life as Mills deftly develops these fascinating, deeply human characters and wrings the maximum amount of humor, sadness, joy, and passion from a series of memorable scenes.
Mills’ own life served as the foundation for much of his Beginners script. Like Hal, Mills’ father came out of the closet at age 75, shortly after the death of his wife of 45 years, and then embarked on an enthusiastic exploration of new experiences during his final five years of life. In the film, Oliver works as an artist and graphic designer–the same line of work that initially propelled Mills to prominence. Oliver’s drawings (crafted by Mills) play a small but key role in the film, revealing the mental state of a man who struggles to express himself with words. Areas of overlap with Mills’ life and art pepper the film, but these autobiographical elements are merely a starting point for a personal but universal story.
Ultimately, what is onscreen is a combination of Mills’ memories and his imagination, just as the romantic story that plays out between Oliver and Anna is a combination of their imaginations and the memories that serve as pillars for their personalities. Early in the film Oliver takes Anna on a joyride, telling her, “You point, I’ll drive,” and careening the car onto a sidewalk in an attempt to follow her imprecisely pointed finger. Much later, we learn that Oliver’s seemingly improvised “You point, I’ll drive” game was in fact cribbed from his mother, with some new touches added.
The fluidity of memory is evoked partially through the film’s structure. Sequences from the past and present are woven together as scenes unfold, so that both the viewer and Oliver interpret the past through the lens of the present and vice versa. Mills also furthers this motif with the subtle details of shot choice. Some scenes are repeated in the film more than once, such as Hal’s disclosure of his homosexuality and Oliver’s first kiss with Anna. In these repeated memories Mills uses an alternate take of the action. Sometimes noticeable and sometimes nearly imperceptible, this technique visually expresses the inherent subjectivity of memory.
To make the memory elements of the story more visceral for his actors, Mills even structured his shooting schedule as if he were making two separate films. After chronologically working through the Oliver/Hal plot he took a short break and then began the Oliver/Anna sequences. When Oliver tells Anna about his father, McGregor is recalling scenes he has already shot, while Laurent truly hears about them for the first time.
In a movie filled with excellent performances, Christopher Plummer stands out, bringing a youthful curiosity to Hal even as he battles terminal disease. In a wonderfully understated performance, Ewan McGregor communicates volumes with his eyes. Mélanie Laurent, who first became known to American audiences in Inglorious Basterds, makes Anna an alluring, vivid, and complex character. This is especially impressive given that English is a second language for Anna, as it is for Laurent. It is a matter of speculation as to whether Anna is meant to overlap with Mills’ real-life wife, the artist and filmmaker Miranda July. Turning in one of the most memorable animal performances in decades, even Cosmo the Jack Russell Terrier may garner some write-in votes for best-supporting actor.
Mills has a rare gift for visual storytelling. The opening shots of the film show a mostly empty house where Oliver is tying up loose ends. As he empties bottles of medication into a toilet, the fading grey daylight and the empty deadpan on Oliver’s face express his sadness better than any expository dialogue possibly could. Later, a single soft-focus shot of Oliver and Anna laughing on a walk through the Los Angeles hills suffices where most romantic comedy directors would have crammed a three-minute montage.
Occasionally this visual shorthand verges on going too far. A roller-skating sequence and a few romantic interchanges skirt the line between endearing character development and sugary movie cliché, but these rare moments do not compromise the tone that Mills carefully modulates from scene to scene.
Mills is a master at creating mood. Old Alan Lomax jazz recordings and a pitch-perfect piano score constantly tweak the prevailing tone of the film. The evocative shot compositions attest to Mills’ graphic design background as they create both storytelling and style. Many scenes in Beginners manage to simultaneously stir up the heartbreak of loss and the exuberant uncertainty of potential love.
Some of Mills’ stylistic choices in Beginners are overtly self-conscious and surprisingly effective. When Oliver gives a narrated tour of his home and life to the dog he inherits from his father, he voices the nuances of his lonely worldview. Through subtitles, the dog (or its imagined voice) even talks back, with wry wit and humor. In most films, such techniques tend to feel gimmicky or manipulative and fall flat, but here Mills strikes just the right note. Narrated sequences of still images are used to explain Oliver’s family history and some of his musings, and Mills manages to fill these sequences with emotion and vivacity when they easily could have come across as tacked-on slideshows.
Given its subject matter, Beginners is in part a political film, but Mills’ messages are subtly crafted and driven by the humanity of the film’s characters, not by polemical arguments. Talk of Harvey Milk and a creative explanation of the gay pride flag make their way into the film briefly, but the case for gay equality is made by depicting a number of richly developed gay characters whose charms and imperfections will be transparently human in the eyes of any viewer. In this sense, Beginners may be the most effective type of political film.
Humorous and moving, Beginners will surely delight audiences well beyond the typical art house crowd, and one can only hope mainstream moviegoers will see the film. The future of risky Hollywood projects and American political debate will be brighter if films like Beginners reach a wide audience.
Derek Sylvan
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