Beginners is a refreshingly quiet and contemplative film about a subject as simple as finding happiness. Director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker) opens his deeply personal film (based on many of his own real life experiences) with a long wordless scene of a man named Oliver (Ewan McGregor) packing up his deceased father’s belongings. Mills makes it clear from the start that he isn’t going to try very hard to win the audience over with words, but with simple emotions that will make they feel for and identify with the characters. To his enormous credit, he and his wonderful cast create very vivid characters without every pandering or talking down to the audience with overly maudlin trickery.
Following the death of his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), Oliver is in a deeply conflicted type of depression. Hal came out of the closet at age 75, shortly after his wife passed away, and decided to devote the remainder of his life to becoming a gay rights advocate. The film bounces between the present, where Oliver is cautiously wooing a visiting French actress (played by Melanie Laurent), and the past where no matter how supportive he was of his father, he always felt like he was being shut out of his dad’s new life.
Beginners is a simple story told well by a filmmaker who lived though it and actors who have a great grasp on the material. McGregor plays a sad sack who hates his day job so well that it is easy to want to reach out and give him a hug. Plummer portrays Hal as someone who after years of bottling up his emotions has finally learned to live the life he always wanted to live while failing to realize that his biggest supporter was with him the entire time. Just as Hal is letting out all of his emotions, he announces only to his son that he is dying, forcing Oliver to bottle up his emotions and grief in much the same manner. This leads to Oliver being upset that he could never really express any real happiness to his father and makes his relationship with his new girlfriend a lot more difficult than it needs to be. McGregor and Plummer make for an amazing father and son pairing that is imminently memorable because of how real their relationship feels.
There are a few scenes that threaten to drag the film down to the level of a melodramatic tearjerker (a scene involving Oliver going to see Hal’s former lover, played by an excellent and underrated Goran Visnjic, is the primary eye rolling offender), but the cast pulls it off and Mills is very careful to move past sequences of film convention and focus on themes and issues that are universally real. It also has a really cute talking dog named Arthur who communicates through subtitles. It isn’t as odd as it sounds. Anyone who has ever been upset and tried communicating with a pet can identify with exactly what Oliver is going through.
Rating: 
Rated 14A
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer
Directed by: Mike Mills
Top image: A scene from Beginners. Courtesy Alliance Films.
