From Sad To Worse

These Beginners have no luck
By Morgan P Salvo

At one point in Beginners, Ewan McGregor’s’ character Oliver, says “Jack Russells are bred to be cute”. The film’s implicit statement about human beings is much darker in contrast – humans are bred to be sad…and depressed.
Oliver meets Anna (Mélanie Laurent) after his the death of his father Hal (Christopher Plummer), who after 44 years of marriage came out of the closet at age 75 to live a full and energized gay life. The flashbacks of Hal’s newfound honesty turn out to be funny and moving, bringing father and son closer than they’d ever expected. Oliver attempts to love Anna with the same courage, humor, and hope that his father taught him but is at a loss as how to do this as he is perpetually morose.
Mike Mills, venturing into the anti-mainstream again since his 2005 quirk fest Thumbsucker, was smart to cast pretty people with problems, because let’s be honest, we all have problems. Oliver and Anna are beautiful messed up people so we tend to want to feel their pain, but really, if it were Paul Giamatti and Kathy Bates just being sad this movie would generate a whole different dynamic.

Saying that Beginners goes against the grain is putting it mildly. I don’t mind if a movie is about slow burn or existential pain, but if the focal point is just about being sad, backed up by loss and more sadness, there’s not a lot for the audience to sink their teeth into. We are awkwardly bombarded with a case of human spirit versus sadness, set in a backdrop of malaise. Though Hal found what he was looking for later in life and had a stellar time with it, why do these two beautiful people feel the need to brood so somberly?
Still there’s something to be said about a movie that sticks to its guns. Beginners sets a quirky yet somber tone and stays on course throughout. I have to give it props for its alternative way-off-the-beaten-path narrative, which saunters back and forth to tell the stories amidst diagram-like time lines, wherein we get to know who was president and what the sky looked like in 1955 or 1983.A bit too arty for its own good, at times its a necessary and rewarding distraction from all that hurt and angst emanating from the screen.

This flick is basically a story of the lost and lonely trying to discard the self-fulfilling prophecy of relationships never working out. This film studies two people who fear their own happiness and choose to betray and deprive themselves of any shred of pleasure while at the same time admitting that they’d like to try. It’s a consummate call of “Why Bother?” with the retort of because we can. Rustling up the discussion of “Do we really care for others or even ourselves?” the flipside is that if we do and get too analytical we can destroy everything.
Alongside kindness and poignancy we get glimmers of hope meshed with dashed dreams. But in this vague setting of nobody knowing why they do what they do, we get to accept that they just are.
Beginners, through deconstructing traditional opinions, conveys that life is hard. But it forgets to tell its two main characters to get over it...it’s not that bad.

Beginners

Starring Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, Mélanie Laurent, Mary Page Keller
Directed by Mike Mills
2 ½ stars