Old Yorker

  • Beginners

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mike Mills (2010)

    The beginners of the title are a father and son, Hal and Oliver.  After his wife of more than forty years died, Hal, at the age of seventy-five, came out as gay.  His wife knew all along about his sexual orientation and he’d seen a psychiatrist when they first married but in widowerhood Hal announced to his son that he no longer wanted to be ‘theoretically gay’.  In ironic contrast to his father, heterosexual Oliver, a graphic artist in his late thirties, is a complete novice in the business of making a relationship with a woman last.  The confusion of tenses I’ve used is intentional and reflects the structure of Beginners (the second feature of writer-director Mike Mills), which is narrated by the son from a point in time following his father’s death in 2003.  Oliver immediately tells us the whole of Hal’s life story, including its gay four-year coda and the cancer that killed his father, and we see their relationship in flashbacks.  Oliver’s meeting and affair with a French actress called Anna takes place after the old man’s death, and nearly in the present tense.  Mills inserts montages of still photographs into the switches between the various gradings of the past.  The photographs indicate each specific year of particular significance in Oliver’s family’s story, and how sexual mores have changed over the decades.  I expected the fragmentary structure to be a prologue to a less restless narrative line until I realised the whole film was going to be like this.  For the next hour, I became exasperated by the lack of tensions in the principal relationships – between Oliver and Hal, Oliver and Anna, Oliver and Hal’s boyfriend Andy (who’s about the same age as Oliver).  In its last half hour, though, the film gets stronger.

    Beginners is supposedly autobiographical – at least, Mike Mills’ own father came out in old age (Mills himself is married to Miranda July).  It’s understandable why Mills might feel that confers on his screenplay an unarguable authenticity yet the situations of the two main characters feel like givens.   I suppose Oliver is meant to illustrate that ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’ but there’s nothing about Ewan McGregor’s Oliver that suggests why he can’t sustain a romantic or sexual relationship – he’s good-looking, bright, amusing, sensitive, gentle etc.  Hal’s homosexuality is also part of a schematic set-up.  In the flashbacks to Oliver’s childhood, we never see anything of Hal and his wife Georgia’s marriage – only the effect of it on her, as observed by Oliver.  Hal’s no more than a briefly glimpsed, disappearing figure, giving his wife a discreet peck on the cheek before departing the house to immerse himself in his daily work as a museum director.  This is too easy a way of suggesting that the parents were remote from one another.  Georgia complains to her young son that his father is cold and distant but it’s hard to believe from Christopher Plummer’s portrait that Hal developed a warmth and sense of humour simply by realising his homosexuality late in life (and, if he did, it’s frustrating that we can’t observe the difference).  Besides, he and Georgia did have a relationship – even a sexual one of sorts (‘We managed’, he recalls).  According to Hal, Georgia proposed to him, confident that they could ‘sort out’ his sexual nature.  What is it, then, that Oliver’s mother resents – that her husband is gay or that she failed to change him?   Mills has written scenes which give Mary Page Keller, who plays Georgia, no opportunity to distinguish between the two things.  All that seems to matter is that sexual incompatibility blighted the couple’s marriage and their son.

    What’s interesting about this film is that Beginners improves when Oliver’s relationship with Mélanie Laurent’s Anna starts going wrong.  This happens as soon as they stop meeting in her hotel room, she moves into his apartment and he feels in danger of making-a-commitment.  Of course, this going wrong is formulaic too but, when we see it happening, it has a substance missing from the earlier scenes between the pair (who never have a cross word until their relationship’s on the rocks).  Incomprehension of why things aren’t working out but certainty that they’re not is there in Oliver and Anna’s numb, sad faces.  The sense that the film is belatedly taking off at this point is compounded in a closely following scene, in which the dying Hal talks to Oliver about how he came to marry Georgia, even if the depth of feeling Christopher Plummer conveys here (‘I thought – I’ll try anything!’) exposes the flimsiness of much of what’s gone before.  For either autobiographical or commercial reasons (or both), Mills’s approach to the material is sentimentally benign so, just as the falling out between Oliver and Anna is de rigueur, so is their final, hopeful decision to try again.  Here again, although it’s another element of formula, the film is rather successful, thanks to the lovers’ winning lack of confidence that they’ve finally cracked it.

    Shortly after Hal’s death, Oliver’s friends take him to a fancy dress party (where he first meets Anna):  he goes as Sigmund Freud.  His grey wig and beard here give Ewan McGregor a resemblance to Christopher Plummer that hadn’t occurred to me before:  the longer the film went on, the more I thought they matched up well as father and son.  Although McGregor regularly plays Americans, the accent still sounds unnatural.  That aside, he, as usual, comes across as skilful, likeable and lightweight.  The way Mike Mills decided to structure Beginners was probably a shrewd move to conceal not only the thinness of the material but that Ewan McGregor isn’t compelling enough to hold a picture together – although, even in splinters, Oliver’s story is, most of the time, insufficiently interesting.  But McGregor’s limitations are also strengths:  his unthreatening presence makes you feel almost protective towards him.  He’s an unselfish actor too – willing here to play second fiddle in his scenes with Plummer and Laurent – and, not least, Arthur, Hal’s terrier, which becomes a big part of Oliver’s life after his father dies.  McGregor often interprets Oliver’s sadness very expressively.  Christopher Plummer, several years older than Hal’s meant to be, is, along with the dog, the film’s dynamo.  Plummer’s belief in the man he’s playing gets us some way towards believing in him too (and he looks so good at over eighty that you can even believe Hal could attract a much younger partner, through his looks as well as his witty application letter).  Plummer seems very relaxed, and he’s both incisive and amusing.  Watching him here, playing someone without celebrity, you feel you might be watching a great actor in a way you never do watching him play a great man in The Last Station.

    Mélanie Laurent showed a lot of talent in Inglourious Basterds.  In Anna’s early scenes, Mills presents Laurent as kookily irresistible and I feared the worst – but, as Anna’s sunniness fades, her beauty becomes more arresting because it seems more fragile and Laurent puts together another fine, nuanced performance.   The contrasting physical and emotional textures of Anna and Oliver’s mother Georgia are very striking.  Although Mary Page Keller’s disillusioned brittleness as Georgia seems thin and overworked, compared with the acting of the principals, it works because you believe the character is a practised performer.  The role is insecurely written – especially in the bits where the child Oliver and his mother go to an exhibition at Hal’s museum.  You wonder how the marriage has survived as well as it has, and whether the answer is a combination of Georgia’s love for her son and an ability to keep herself under wraps.  You’re persuaded that Georgia expresses her eccentricity and a sense of how she feels only when she’s alone with Oliver.  When she behaves outrageously in public, though, it becomes harder to believe that Georgia has any capacity for hiding her feelings or being long-suffering.  Surely she’s a dutiful, conventional wife in the outside world:  if not, why would she turn up at all at social events at her husband’s place of work?   It is funny, however, when she decides that she’s had enough of the museum party and takes Oliver home, explaining to other guests that he has a ruptured appendix and, when they express shock and horror, announces, ‘He’s a very self-composed child’.   I liked it that Keegan Boos as the young Oliver was facially and vocally odd:  his turning into Ewan McGregor suggests a kind of suppression.

    Perhaps it’s convincing that Hal, after nearly a lifetime under cover, is almost militantly gay.  (One example of this was lost on me:  Hal makes a lot of a rainbow badge as a symbol of gay pride and refuses to accept Oliver’s puzzled insistence that everyone knows that.  I didn’t.)  Otherwise, though, the gay groups the old man consorts with are presented with a condescending simplicity.  All seems to be sweetness and light in their world (rather in the way that films of a different era tend to idealise indigenous tribes in contrast to corrupt colonialists).  This is epitomised in Hal’s gentle giant boyfriend Andy (Goran Visnjic), who’s meant to be touchingly humorous.  (I found a little of Andy went a very long way.)  It’s this element of Beginners that exposes the artificial lack of friction between Oliver and Hal.  There’s little sense that his father’s coming out had any impression on the son.  Wouldn’t Oliver have somewhat divided feelings when, for example, the old man is on the way out and his gay friends are crowded round his bed, reducing Oliver to one among many?   That’s why it’s a good moment when Ewan McGregor’s face momentarily registers irritation in the hospital as Andy brings Hal a love gift of a slug (one of Andy’s endearing habits).  It’s another good moment when the dying Hal tells a male nurse that his hair smells nice, the nurse rubs styling mousse into the old man’s scalp, and his son watches.  You can understand why Oliver is fighting back tears.

    Listening to Mike Mills talk on Radio 4’s The Film Programme last weekend, I realised that Beginners might be more eccentric than I’d expected from the plot outline and the trailer.  In fact it has a neat, innocuous eccentricity which is tiresome:   the montage summations of American life in 1938 or 1955 or 2003; the characters’ little, self-aware verbal jokes; the wryly decorative music.  (There’s a mixture of jazz standards and an ‘original’ score by Roger Neill, Dave Palmer and Brian Reitzell.)    Cosmo who plays Arthur is, however, an unqualified success, in spite of the sophisticated cuteness Mike Mills surrounds him with.   When Arthur looks meaningfully at Oliver, there are subtitles on the screen to tell us what the dog means to say (the projectionist at the Odeon couldn’t get them quite fully on the screen).  When Oliver and Anna go roller-skating and take Arthur with them, they’re told dogs aren’t allowed.  They leave the place and go back to Anna’s hotel room with their skates still on.   This is the kind of romantic wackiness that usually drives me mad but Cosmo/Arthur saves the day.  He’s great at keeping to heel and his trotting conscientiously along with the two humans on roller skates is a delight.

    The running gag that involves Arthur will speak to anyone who’s had anything like a similar experience with a dog.   Whenever Oliver tries to leave him at home, Arthur starts whining and scratching as soon as the door closes behind Oliver, who always gives in and goes back for the dog.   The only time this doesn’t happen is when Oliver, who has to go after Anna to retrieve their relationship, in desperation leaves the animal with Andy.  Arthur remembers Andy and is happy to stay with him.  (I was pleased, though, that Mills resisted the sentimental temptation of having the dog end up with his old master’s lover.)  There’s stuff about Oliver and his friends (Kai Lennox and China Shavers, both irritating) doing graffiti, which doesn’t seem to connect to anything else.  Oliver’s plan to create a graphic history of sadness obviously does connect but the interstitial drawings, in combination with the presence of Christopher Plummer and an elderly gay man’s beloved dog in the story, meant that My Dog Tulip came, occasionally and confusingly, to mind.

    28 July 2011

  • Before the Revolution

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Prima della rivoluzione

    Bernardo Bertolucci (1964)

    Set in Parma in 1962, Before the Revolution is about a young bourgeois who’s intending to devote himself to the Communist cause but who finds distractions that change his mind – or rather deepen his ambivalence.  I came to the film knowing it was regarded as autobiographical (although not precisely so:  by 1962, Bertolucci had already made La commare secca) and that it had some connection with La chartreuse de Parme (the relationship between the two principals echoes the Stendhal novel and these characters are named for their literary inspirations).  With these assumptions in mind, I wasn’t sure, during the first half hour, if the film was ever going to develop a life of its own.  In the interview with Bertolucci used as the BFI programme note (Sally managed to get the last one of these – how do they manage to run out when it isn’t even a full house?), he’s quoted as saying that each of the main characters – not just his obvious alter ego Fabrizio – ‘is me’.  In the early stages, you get the impression that Bertolucci is interested primarily in having the people on the screen express his own thoughts.  He seems to be divvying up the moral and philosophical insights without giving the characters individual voices.

    What’s so remarkable about Before the Revolution is that, in spite of this, it gradually acquires a vital independence and psychological dynamism through the brilliance of the film-making.   An outstanding example:  halfway through, Bertolucci introduces the character of Puck, a wealthy landowner and friend of Gina, the aunt (some ten years older than him) with whom Fabrizio is having an affair.   Puck bemoans his failing fortunes; Fabrizio lays into the rich man for developing a social conscience only when his own financial security is under threat.  You think it’ll be impossible for this sequence to do anything more than make political points:  how can Puck’s words matter when it’s the first time we’ve seen him and he doesn’t yet mean anything to us as a character?   But the combination of images which Puck’s lament accompanies – the trees, the lake, everything on the estate that’s going to be lost – is so compelling that his words do have emotional heft.  What’s more, and in spite of what Fabrizio says to Puck, those images also connect with Fabrizio’s own commitment to living in the moment because each moment is transient.

    Pauline Kael confused the excitement of the twenty-three-year-old Bertolucci’s artistry with the character of Fabrizio when she wrote that the director (he also wrote the screenplay, with Gianni Amico) ‘captures what has rarely been seen on the screen – the extravagance and poetry of youthful ardor’.  Francesco Barilli as Fabrizio isn’t ardent but he is extremely convincing as this handsome, humourless young man who can’t make up his mind what he wants but is dogmatically censorious when it comes to putting other people right.  (Kael is much nearer the mark when she describes Fabrizio as ‘callowly doctrinaire’.)  And Barilli’s inchoate quality – the sense of possibility he embodies – is appealing, especially in his scenes with Gina.   (A quick Google search reveals that Barilli, just twenty when the film was made, hasn’t acted much but has had success as a writer, director and painter over the last forty years.  His uncle, Cecrope Barilli, also a painter, plays Puck.)  Already well known through her roles in Rocco and His Brothers and Accattone, Adriana Asti is undoubtedly the star presence.  Since she subsequently married Bertolucci (and is seven years his senior), it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the increasing concentration on Gina-Asti in Before the Revolution reflects a further autobiographical layer.

    Because Fabrizio is the central consciousness, it’s a little distracting – beguiling as Adriana Asti is – when the sophisticated but screwed up Gina takes over.  (She gets involved with her nephew while on a visit to Parma from Milan, where she now lives and works.)  Gina is, though, truly at the centre of the finest resonance in the film.   Dancing with Fabrizio in his family’s home, Gina then invites her younger nephew Enore (Guido Fanti) to partner her and he obliges with sheepish reluctance.  It’s a charming but charged moment:  as Fabrizio watches smilingly (and he rarely smiles), we get a sense that Gina, as she holds the younger brother, is aware of how young the other nephew, to whom she’s now sexually attracted, still is – of how part of her wants Fabrizio to be the boy she remembers and that Enore still is.   (While Fabrizio embraces the ephemerality of things, Gina tells him in one of their conversations that she prefers things to stay the same.)   The reprise is piercing when, in the final scene at Fabrizio’s wedding to Clelia (Cristina Pariset), Gina hugs the (once again embarrassed) Enore to console her, and can’t let him go.

    The title derives from Talleyrand’s remark – ‘He who did not live in the years before the [1789] Revolution cannot understand the sweetness of living’.  Bertolucci uses it as an epigraph at the start of the film but its more interesting use comes later, when  Fabrizio acknowledges that, for a sensibility like his, life will always be ‘before the revolution’.  The obstructions to complete political commitment come in the shape of sex, social and familial convention, and cinema – and these competing imperatives modify Fabrizio’s allegiance to any one of them.   The sexual education that Gina gives him precedes marriage to a lovely, innocuous young girl – just what his parents (Amelia Bordi and Domenico Alpi), against whom he means to rebel, wanted.   Fabrizio’s love of film depends on the mood he’s in:  he drifts into a picture house when his mind is on Gina (Une femme est une femme is showing) and emerges arm in arm with an exhaustingly wholehearted but likeably self-aware film bore (Gianni Amico?):  the latter predicts that Anna Karina will define their generation and reminds Fabrizio that life is impossible without Rossellini.    The climactic sequence at the opera – the opening night of a production of local hero Verdi’s Macbeth, which also sees the ending of Fabrizio’s affair with Gina ­– is thrilling.  It’s a superb orchestration of emotional, visual and musical movement.  Fabrizio is up in a box with Clelia and her mother (Ida Pellegri); his mother and grandmother (Iole Lunardi – an amazing face) are down in the stalls, and are joined there by Gina.  She and Fabrizio then leave their seats and he tracks her down in the theatre entrance while the opera is still going on.  (Opera’s at its best when it’s supplying dramatic context in a film drama …)

    A great thing about Bertolucci is that he’s no less powerfully expressive when what’s on screen isn’t obviously exciting.  An early shot of an empty road and Fabrizio’s friend Agostino (Allen Midgette) cycling down it communicates an extraordinary sense of the calm and desolation of ennui.  (Agostino, who dies – drowns himself? – shortly afterwards, remains an opaque character, though.)  The handsome claustrophobia of the Parma town square, Gina’s walk to the station in the rain, with Fabrizio’s Communist mentor Cesare helping carry her luggage – these images have the texture of something remembered.  They may be built from the director’s personal memories but they feel so precisely real that they fuse with one’s own.   Bertolucci also has an acute understanding of what he can achieve by what he doesn’t show.  In the first half of Before the Revolution, the name of Cesare is frequently invoked by Fabrizio but the man is never seen.  This builds up our expectations and means that, when we do meet Cesare and he turns out to be honourable but also bespectacled, uncharismatic and faintly defeated (he’s well played by Morando Morandini), our slightly guilty feelings of anti-climax connect with Fabrizio’s inability to adopt Communism wholeheartedly.  At the end, as he and Clelia leave the church, we never quite see Fabrizio’s face, which is always obscured by the other wedding guests.  It’s as if he’s chickened out of being the man he might have been, effacing himself in the process.   The cinematographer was Aldo Scavardi and this early score by Ennio Morricone is one of his best, less obviously melodious but also less smoothly predictable than the music he’s best known for.  It was very frustrating that the subtitles didn’t supply translations of the several pop songs we hear playing or of a song sung to Gina by a young girl (Evelina Alpi).

    20 April 2011

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