Review: "Beginners" Was So Good I Didn't Want it to End

Do we ever truly recover from grief? Or do we just internalize it, absorbing it and letting it merge with our conscience until it becomes just one more facet of our being? When those we’ve loved pass away, do we see them as a memory, lost forever to time, or does their story continue on, removed from its temporal constraints so that it may still run parallel to our own?

The latter certainly is the case for Oliver, played with a shell-shocked vulnerability by Ewan McGregor, in Mike Mills’ brilliant new film Beginners. It seems to also be the case for Mills himself, who based the script loosely on his own experience of having his 75-year-old father come out of the closet on the heels of his mother’s death, only to almost immediately learn his father has cancer.

Beginners is, in many ways, a meditation on grief. In fact, of all the films I’ve seen recently that tackle similar subject matter, Beginners is brave enough to come to the conclusion that we don’t so much move past grief as we simply learn to incorporate it into our daily lives, often learning much about ourselves in the process.

Mills has said that the film was written when his own grief endowed him with a kind of manic energy, an urgent and frenzied explosion of creativity that altered his entire perception of the world around him. But as much as Beginners explores grief, it very clearly sees the human beauty in it as well, the art that can only be discovered on the heels of great sorrow.

When the film opens, we learn almost immediately that Oliver, a graphic artist, is surprised when his father, Hal (a fantastic Christopher Plummer), comes out to him, and even more surprised when his previously reserved father becomes vibrant and alive, glowing with a determination to soak up as much of this new life as he can in his remaining years. That Plummer is a living legend is common knowledge, and his resume speaks for itself. But he is so utterly delightful in the role of Hal, at turns wise, brave, impish, hilarious, wistful, and more joyous than a thousand Charlie Brown Christmas specials, I felt I was discovering him all over again.

In the opening minutes when Oliver recaps his father’s coming out, he also tells us his father dies about five years later, but in those five years he fell in love, found a wonderfully supportive group of gay friends, and became closer to Oliver than ever before.

Intercut with this storyline is the aftermath of Hal’s passing, when Oliver stumbles into a relationship with the stunningly gorgeous French actress Anna (played by the stunningly gorgeous French actress Melanie Laurent). Their romance faces its challenges, as both are hesitant to let their respective walls down and become even more vulnerable than they already feel. It makes sense – both have their own baggage.

Oliver has doubts about relationships considering the falsehoods in his parents’ marriage. Anna must fend off calls from her mentally unbalanced father, who constantly threatens suicide, and so she tends to move around a lot before he can find her. Oliver uses emotional distance to keep people at bay; Anna uses geography.

McGregor and Laurent have excellent chemistry on screen – so good, in fact, that I didn’t even realize until after their initial meeting I had been ambushed by a meet-cute: they first encounter each other at a costume party during which Oliver is dressed as Freud and is counseling fellow party-goers. When Anna lies down on the couch, she can’t speak due to a bout of laryngitis. Wacky hijinks ensue. But all this is forgivable, as the characters feel so genuine.

In interviews, Mills is always quick to distance himself from his cinematic avatar, but the similarities are too abundant to ignore. Particularly, Oliver’s job as a graphic artist who spends much of the film drawing in his studio – and no surprise, most of the drawings were supplied by Mills himself. The drawings form an ongoing motif in which we can chart Olvier’s emotional journey through his art, particularly obvious when he books a job drawing album art for a band called “The Sads.” It’s a pleasing device that works well and moves the film along at a nice pace.

This is a film that stays with you long after the credits roll, and ultimately what you take away is that grief is not something to be feared, but something to be explored. Though many of Hal’s late-in-life discoveries are specific to his gayness – there is a scene in which Hal is shocked to discover that his young, straight son knows that the rainbow flag is the symbol for gay pride, and in fact, as Oliver tells him, “everyone knows that” – there is a universal aspect to much of this, particularly to those who long to be closer to their parents, if they could just figure out how.

With a smart script, intriguing story-telling devices, and excellent performances from all three leads, this film comes highly recommended. Heck, there’s even an adorable dog. Does it get any better than that?