Beginners

Delicate business is being transacted in this touchingly personal and altogether extraordinary film from writer-director Mike Mills. As Oliver, a conceptional artist, Ewan McGregor is a surrogate for Mills. The cancer-related death of his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), has persuaded Oliver to examine his own emotional core. Only five years earlier, at 75, Hal had come out as a gay man.

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What did this say about Hals marriage to Olivers mother (Mary Page Keller) and to his workaholic fathers frustratingly distant relationship to him? Oliver doesnt judge his father. He simply looks back at Hals late-blooming openness, especially at the passion and compassion that blend in Hals love affair with the much younger Andy (Goran Visnjic), and wonders why hes never been able to find that in himself. Mills turns Beginners into something more than a movie. Its a collage of collected memories of his father coupled with an art project hes developing on The History of Sadness and a tentative
reaching out to Anna (the excellent Mlanie Laurent), a French actress perhaps looking for more than Oliver can deliver.

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At times, Oliver seems more comfortable with Arthur, his fathers Jack Russell terrier, who speaks in witty subtitles. What may sound precious in description emerges with fervent vigor and truth onscreen. Like his wife, the artist and filmmaker Miranda July, Mills deals in unforced images and sounds that exert their own freedom. McGregor goes bone-deep in a performance of shining subtlety. And a never-better Plummer is simply stupendous, refusing any call to sentiment as he shows us Hals resonant lunge at life. Mills works the same way. Beginners is one from the bruised heart.