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.