Dog day afternoons: Mike Mills’ BEGINNERS [4/10]

Published on: August 16th, 2011


Last January, more than fifty years after his big-screen debut, Canadian veteran Christopher Plummer finally landed a ludicrously overdue first Oscar nomination for his crustily mystical Tolstoy in Michael Hoffman’s old-fashioned biographical drama The Last Station (2009).

As is the way of these things, the now being strongly tipped to instantly double his Best Supporting Actor nomination-haul (and perhaps even win this time) via Mike Mills’ quasi-indie comedy-drama Beginners, in which he plays a senior-citizen who comes out of the closet around the same time as he’s diagnosed with a terminal illness: an awards-bait double-whammy if ever there was one.

But while few would begrudge the reliably consistent, versatile Plummer his Oscar, and while he’s perfectly fine in Beginners – striking just the right balance between hedonistic self-indulgence and world-weary mortal thoughts – it would be very much a Lifetime Achievement award in all but name, coming in several notches below, say, his inexplicably un-nominated performance in Michael Mann’s The Insider.

And Beginners itself is overall a disappointing, rather trifling affair: a modishly-edited, time-hopping, preciously twee enterprise which confirms that if Miranda July is 21st century America’s Victoria Wood (with touches of Elaine May and Kate Bush) then her husband Mills may be compared with Wood’s sometime spouse Geoffrey ‘The Great Soprendo’ Durham, the middlingly talented children’s-TV entertainer who seemed content to remain in his gifted wife’s considerable shadow.

Affecting a passable American accent (much more convincing than the pseudo-Cockney tones that somehow didn’t prevent his winning a European Film Award for The Ghost Writer) Ewan McGregor stars as Oliver, a mopey, commitment-phobic illustrator who, after the death of his father Hal (Plummer) in 2003, looks back over the last four years of the latter’s life.

This was the period when, newly widowed, Hal acknowledged his long-suppressed true sexuality, launched into an affair with the much younger Andy (Goran Visnjic), and embraced the gay world’s various social possibilities. Oliver’s introspection and retrospection also involves flashbacks to his childhood (his younger self played by Keegan Boos), when the dominant influence was his gregarious Jewish mother Georgia (Mary Page Keller, turning in the movie’s most vivid, affecting work.)

We deduce that the strength of his relationship with Georgia has contributed to the genial, good-looking adult Oliver’s plausiblity-straining difficulties with girls – an insecurity which threatens his budding romance with stunning French actress Anna (Melanie Laurent). Oliver confides his worries to his attentive flatmate Arthur (four-legged thespian Cosmo) – the latter being his father’s Jack Russell terrier, who “communicates” with his new owner by expressive looks and head-tilts, these being rendered into English by on-screen subtitles.

The latter touch, while passably charming thanks to Cosmo’s doggy appeal, is all of a piece with Beginners‘ general tone of strenuous quirkiness. July somehow gets away with deploying feline narration throughout her (excellent) current picture The Future, as part of a coherent and persuasive overall concept. With Mills, such affectations come across as both more arbitrary and calculated – borrowed, like much else here, from the well-thumbed Woody Allen playbook of bittersweet urban-intellectual romantic misadventure. McGregor and Laurent do make for a photogenic couple, to be sure, but they never really convey much in the way of chemistry – and the less said about Visnjic’s big-sloppy-kid turn as mop-headed Andy, the better.

Edited into self-conscious, episodic choppiness by Olivier Bugge Coutté, Beginners has intermittent flashes of inspiration and delicacy but is overall an underwhelming addition to a clapped-out, overstuffed sub-genre. It’s also a prime example of a faux-independent production which would have had more impact with fresh faces in the leading roles, rather than established talents seeking credibility-points – and perhaps an award or two – in between better-paying, more ‘mainstream’ gigs.

Neil Young
16th August, 2011

seen 24th July at the Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle
BEGINNERS : [4/10] : USA 2010 : Mike MILLS : 105 mins (BBFC) : {11/28}