Film review: Beginners

Published on Sunday 17 July 2011 17:49

Beginners (15) **** Director: Mike Mills Running time: 105 minutes

ON THE face of it, writer-director Mike Mills' romantic comedy-drama has its work cut out persuading you that it won't be so cute and loveable that it practically comes down from the screen and demands a hug. For one thing, it has a sweet-faced Jack Russell who talks in subtitles. But underneath it all this is a funny, clever, compassionate movie about deferred love that knows exactly what it is at every moment.

Ewan McGregor plays Oliver, an artist too creative to be very successful, who is coming to terms with the death of his father Hal (Christopher Plummer), as well as his father's revelation some years earlier that, despite 44 years of marriage to Oliver's mother, he is gay. Apparently Hal was not unhappily married, but when his wife passes away, he enthusiastically shrugs off his emotional reserve, seizes the chance to be himself, and dives into gay rights, clubbing and a relationship with much younger personal trainer Goran Visnjic Gay septuagenarians may ruefully note that this last bit is about as plausible as the films where gorgeous women fight for the chance to date Jonah Hill.

Beginners flashes back and forth in time as Oliver sorts through the complications of two big relationships. While he accepts his father being gay, he's worried that this implies his parents had a long loveless relationship. Piecing together brief, bittersweet childhood memories of a repressed eccentric mother (Mary Page Keller) who married a man she knew to be gay makes Oliver all the more reluctant to rush into coupledom himself. However when he meets Anna, a French actress (Inglourious Basterds' Melanie Laurent), he's forced to confront his commitment issues.

All this makes Beginners sound like In The Psychiatrists' Chair with dogs, and it really is a lot better than that. I hardly dare tell you that Oliver meets Anna at a Hallowe'en Ball where he's dressed as Sigmund Freud and she is a cross-dressed Charlie Chaplin who can only communicate by notepad because she has laryngitis. It all sounds horribly fey and whimsical: and yet, like Hal's dog who talks in subtitles, it's so deftly handled that it actually works.

It's certainly an introspective film – Mike Mills' story is based on his own father coming out at 75, the same age as Hal – but the themes are universal: an ever-expanding love story that is both anguished and optimistic, delivered with a tender sensibility. McGregor hasn't been a hot property for some time and I can't remember the last time he gave such a wry, controlled performance, but along with The Ghost last year, Beginners is a welcome reminder that the actor can still surprise us. Oliver's recessive personality could seem to be a whinge, but McGregor makes him engaging and rather moving, plus his chemistry with Laurent is terrific.

However, this is really Plummer's show: and he gives a lovely, exuberant, affecting performance that is neither sexless not saintly. "I don't want to be just theoretically gay," Hal says, with the matter of factness of his generation. "I want to do something about it." When he buys a more colourful wardrobe, you want to cheer; when he deals with the insecurities of his new lifestyle bravely, you cheer more.

• On general release from Friday. This article first appeared in Scotland on Sunday on 17 July 2011