Something to watch tonight: Friday 15 November

Beginners (Mills, 2010)

On this day in 2011, I pos­ted a review of one of my favour­ite films of all time and I’m pleased to note that you can actu­ally rent it again now in Aotearoa.

Beginners won Christopher Plummer a well-deserved Oscar at the age of 82.

I really don’t want much. It’s simple. All I ask is for someone with tal­ent to take some of their life exper­i­ence and merge it with that tal­ent in the hope that the res­ult­ing work of art might help illu­min­ate some aspect of my life. That’s all. And yet it rarely hap­pens. Which means I’m very grate­ful that with Beginners, Mike Mills has done exactly that and pro­duced a ter­rif­ic film that is intensely per­son­al – both to him and to me.

Ewan McGregor plays a gloomy Los Angelean illus­trat­or: lone­some, intro­spect­ive, self-sabotaging; all les­sons learnt grow­ing up an only child in a house­hold where his fath­er was a closeted gay and his moth­er lived a con­strained and lonely life of ima­gin­a­tion. When she dies of can­cer, McGregor’s fath­er (Christopher Plummer) is freed from the bonds of mar­riage, comes out at the age of 75 and throws him­self whole-heartedly into the the LA gay scene – includ­ing post­ing reveal­ing per­son­al ads and start­ing a rela­tion­ship with a bud­ding pyro­tech­ni­cian named Andy (Goran Visnjic). And then he gets cancer.

McGregor, mean­while, is telling this story in flash­back, sev­er­al months after his father’s death, at the same time as he’s wrest­ling with a poten­tially per­fect new rela­tion­ship with a beau­ti­ful French act­ress (Mélanie Laurent) and work­ing out if he can avoid wreck­ing it like he did the others.

That’s rather more plot than I nor­mallly worry about reveal­ing here but it’s not a plot-ty film, though, it’s a char­ac­ter study and the two guys are as coher­ent, believ­able and well-rounded as any­body writ­ten in recent cinema. Laurent’s Anna is slightly less so but that’s the only flaw in a film that I found to be mov­ing, pro­found, witty and humane.

Mills dir­ects his own superb script with deft­ness, allow­ing (in fact prob­ably insist­ing on) his key line in the whole film to be almost swal­lowed: “He didn’t give up.” That’s it. It’s what the film is about and what the pre­vi­ous 100 minutes have been lead­ing up to. Every moment is import­ant and every scene and every line con­nects with each oth­er to con­struct a won­der­fully sat­is­fy­ing whole.

McGregor has seemed a bit lost in recent years – since that Star Wars sojourn per­haps – but here he deliv­ers on all that early prom­ise and reminds us what he was all about. And Plummer, who enriches every film he appears in, is simply tran­scend­ent in this. I whole­heartedly recom­mend Beginners and look for­ward to adding it to my per­son­al col­lec­tion when the home ver­sion is avail­able. It’s a keeper.

Also reviewed in that Capital Times column on 15 November 2011: Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion; Happy Ever Afters (“the worst film I have ever seen dur­ing 25 years of vis­it­ing the Paramount”); bril­liant doc­u­ment­ary about Chinese migrant fact­ory work­ers, Last Train Home; anoth­er doc­u­ment­ary, Eco-Pirate: The Story of Paul Watson; and Takashi Miike’s samurai west­ern 13 Assassins.

Where to watch Beginners

Aotearoa, Australia: Digital rent­al from Apple

Canada: Streaming on Starz, SundanceNow/AMC+ or CTV (free with ads)

Ireland, USA & UK: Digital rental

India: Not cur­rently available

Further reading and listening

I was lucky enough to inter­view Mike Mills back in 2022 for his film C’mon C’mon and the full inter­view (on the old Rancho Notorious pod­cast feed) is still avail­able at RNZ. He was great.

I also recom­mend C’mon C’mon here back in March this year.