There’s nothing funny about an old man, struck with terminal cancer, who only finds the courage to admit that he’s gay after the death of his wife of 44 years.
No, this is not material rife with comic potential, but sometimes laughter is the only way to cope. In his nuanced second feature Beginners, writer-director Mike Mills recognizes this, collecting a small ensemble of sad, lonely people and finding the humor that arises when other emotions seem intractably out of grasp.
The old man is named Hal Fields, and he’s portrayed, with wry, elegant gallantry, by Christopher Plummer. He is both dead and not dead for most of the picture, thanks to Mills’ nonlinear structure. Hal’s depressed (and depressing) artist son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) tells us in the movie’s earliest stanzas the key facts about his father, namely his belated sexual outing, his sickness and his demise.
But we spend the rest of the picture drifting between Oliver’s present – spent dealing with his father’s postmortem baggage, and shadowed by dad’s clingy Jack Russell – his immediate past with the suddenly out-gay Hal, and his post-World War II childhood, where he watched his parents keep up appearances in a seemingly loveless arrangement.
Plummer is the movie’s most tragic character, and he gives its most authentic performance. “I don’t want to be just theoretically gay,” he tells his son, and his complete immersion into the gay lifestyle – meeting a young boyfriend through a dating service, subscribing to The Advocate, screening The Times of Harvey Milk with a roomful of activists – is convincing in its youthful abandon. Plummer explores this environment with a self-actualizing, hedonistic smile, the way a teenager might when he first discovers his loins.
But Beginners is McGregor’s movie; he’s in nearly every scene, and his listless performance tends to weigh down the proceedings. As in some of his other pictures (Cassandra’s Dream, I Love You Phillip Morris), he’s a blank slate that rarely becomes full, a cipher from an old Bresson film. If this were a movie that warranted inexpressiveness, he would make a model mannequin, but he’s supposed to be a compelling, brooding protagonist discovering love for the first time – in the form of Melanie Laurent’s Anna, an actress he meets at a costume party while dressed, amusingly, as Sigmund Freud. Instead, his work only feels static opposite the vibrancy of Laurent and Plummer.
McGregor’s work is best – and so is Mills’ – when he’s not even on the screen, narrating photographic images of the past, present and future of the characters and the world around them. Here, McGregor’s sterile monotone works, presenting an unforgiving society free of sentimentality (over a monochrome image of a grimy bathroom, he tells us that this is the only place his father could be himself). This is also where Mills most flexes the stylistic muscle he discovered while filming music videos for the likes of Moby, Pulp and Air. These riveting photographic essays, undoubtedly influenced by the flipbook-style films of Chris Marker, suggest an experimental director burrowing through the commercial confines of Indiewood narrative.
And it makes sense that Oliver would deliver information in these distancing, Dadaist diversions. Like the enigmatic, inaccessible drawings he creates and the esoteric graffiti he plasters on public spaces, he’s one of the film’s many victims of ill communication, unable to say what he needs, when he needs and to whom he needs.
The two characters Oliver most talks to – Anna and Arthur, the Jack Russell – both suffer from their own aphasia; the silent Anna has laryngitis when she meets Oliver, and Arthur is a dog (though we can read his funny/heartbreaking thoughts via subtitles in a Woody Allen-like recurring bit). And Hal, of course, went 44 years without saying what he felt. But he proves that it’s never too late to start anew, and to do so with a smile – even in the face of death.
BEGINNERS. Director: Mike Mills; Cast: Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, Melanie Laurent, Goran Visnjic; Distributor: Focus Features; Rating: R; Opens: Friday; Venue: Gateway Theatre in Fort Lauderdale, Coral Gables Art Cinema and Regal South Beach 18.