The human condition is just not easily parsed.
Beginners
will hold your attention from start to finish as you watch a handful of
extremely unconventional people thread their ways through their own eccentric
stories. The fact that all of them remain somewhat opaque even at story's end
doesn't matter a bit. We have become thoroughly interested in them, abounding as
they are in a full complement of human complexities. It is refreshingly assumed
that the human condition is just not easily parsed.
The movie
opens with Oliver (Ewan McGregor) as he sorts through his father's belongings
after the old man's long, slow death from cancer. From that point forward the
movie unfolds through Oliver's memories - of his father Hal (Christopher
Plummer) and mother Georgia (Mary Page Keller), and of Anna, a nomadic French
actress (Melanie Laurent, so memorable in Inglorious Basterds.)
In the early
scenes we meet Arthur the dog, his father's legacy to Oliver, who comments
periodically via sub-titles on the emotional tangle that all of them inhabit. As
Arthur becomes the connecting link among all the people we care about, we watch
carefully their reactions to him and his to them. It is at this early point that
we begin to realize that we are in the hands of a writer and a director of
uncommon talent for original detail. It turns out, of course, that one man, Mike
Mills, wears both those hats.
After his
cancer diagnosis, Hal tells his son he has always been gay, that he and his
mother had an understanding about it, that he intends to find a lover (Goran
Vienjic), and that he will use his remaining years to cruise the public gay
culture. No one could be better suited to this tricky role than the dignified
and graceful Christopher Plummer.
Oliver,
damaged by his parents' distant marriage and distrustful of any kind of
commitment, surrenders to prodding from father and friends to put some fun in
his life. In one of Hollywood's most inspired meetings, he goes to a costume
party as Sigmund Freud and meets Anna. From here, the movie is shot through with
the joy of discovery in all quarters as it papers over the sadness that each of
the characters carries forward from the previous lives they are trying to leave
behind. .
The writing
and directing here are so delicate that any bit of miscasting could have sunk
the whole. In Mike Mills' hands, everything works. Ewan McGregor, hugely
appealing in his natural warmth, wins us completely as the vulnerable Oliver who
can't resist the love of either Anna or his dog Arthur. Melanie Laurent's Anna
is curiously enigmatic, even mysterious. She and McGregor have created a
credible and winning romance that any audience will appreciate. And if you want
to enjoy a scene stealer, watch every move made by Mary Page Keller as Georgia,
the mother of Oliver's memories. And the title is perfect. All of them are
beginners at lives they haven't tried before.
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