Film 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