Beginners is a heartbreaking, soulful exploration of both hetero and homosexual repression. It’s a deeply personal and haunting narrative recalling other homosexual poets and their stories, most notably Terrance Davies. All of this we see through the eyes of Ewan McGregor’s Oliver, who must get his terminally-ill father Hal’s life, including his dog, in order. Oliver attempts to map human sadness and starts a series of sketches to capture its evolution over time.
Set in 2005, he is a beginner in some ways himself. Never married (or frequently in break-ups), he sees the world through his practice: graphic design. In voice-overs he tells us “this is what pretty looked like in 1955” and so forth, in an attempt to understand his own father and perhaps his mother’s repression as he grapples with his own sadness.
A few months after Oliver’s mother passes, his dad, Hal, played brilliantly by Christopher Plummer, comes out to his son. He had always been a homosexual in theory and is now excited to practice, finding himself a new younger lover with a father complex, Andy (Goran Visnjic). Hal, now liberated, starts wearing designer jeans and putting himself out in the personals.
Haunting and lyrical, Mills often centers his subjects in frame, creating a beautiful and piercing intimacy into his images. Mills spoke on the film after it screened at SXSW, explaining how personal the experience was, highlighting how rare this kind of achievement is, combining experimental film and narrative in a search for an emotional connection through images, piecing a narrative from fragments of the past as its Oliver deals with his present (the future is of little concern to him, as he has yet to begin).
He meets a lovely young French women (Melanie Laurent) at a party and they begin to date. Unsure how to perform his own identity, coupled with the timing of his father’s death, Oliver is often searching for the images to make his words mean something. Beginners is about the healing process as a means of starting over to achieve what should be apparent: happiness. His father’s dog is a valuable character. McGregor’s Oliver projects what he wants to hear from his faithful dog. These come in the form of subtitles.
The brilliance of Beginners is found within its structure, flipping images between past and present flawlessly. This is a guided emotional journey that presents a past Oliver had no reason to research until now, as a means of understanding. To paraphrase Oliver: This is what building a narrative looks like.
Beginners hits theaters June 3rd.