Cinema Verdict Review: Beginners

Beginners

OPENING: 06/03/2011

STUDIO: Focus Features

RUN TIME: 105 min

ACCOMPLICES: Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
This is what love feels like.

Opening Statement
Listeners of the F This Movie podcast may have heard my DVD Verdict colleagues’ defense of the ambitious failure. Those movies try to do something different because they come from an artistic vision rather than a marketing committee, and sometimes the results aren’t successful. I admire movies that are different too, which is why Beginners inspires mixed feelings for me. There are many endearingly unique touches but here’s a case where the sum of the parts don’t add up to a satisfying viewing experience.

Facts of the Case
Oliver (Ewan McGregor, The Ghost Writer) is clearing out the personal effects of his late father, Hal (Christopher Plummer, The Last Station). Through a series of flashbacks, Oliver recalls his father’s last four years as a just-out-of-the-closet gay widower who lived it up until succumbing to cancer. In the present, depressed Oliver meets a French actress named Anna (Mélanie Laurent, Inglourious Basterds) at a costume party. Can she snap him out of his emotional stupor?

The Evidence
Writer-director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker) shows that he has a handle on maintaining mood. The look and the sound of the movie reflect Oliver’s emotional numbness in the aftermath of his father’s death. The streets seem a little emptier and the world is much quieter than it has been before. It’s a daring move to keep up this down beat atmosphere for the entirety of the movie, especially for a romance. However, after spending about 20 minutes in Oliver’s world, it loses its appeal. His sadness isn’t oppressive enough to be interesting and there aren’t enough glimmers of hope to suggest this mood will improve. There isn’t a strong narrative drive to bring Oliver back to the world of the living, the movie just wallows in his sadness.

The movie rests heavily on Oliver’s emotional state, which is manifest in his work and his words. A cartoonist, presumably, he is drawing a series that details the history of sadness. It’s a high-concept work that he wants to sell to a band called The Sads for their CD release. We also hear Oliver chronicle his own history (and that of his parents) through a series of sequences edited in a collage manner — seemingly random images that share a connection — and almost clinically narrated. “This is 2003. This is what the sun looks like. This is what the sun looked like in 1955. That was the year my parents got married,” Oliver states in a cold monotone. These moments, with some lovely musical assistance, suggest something powerful and profound will be revealed in their starkness. These scenes are among the most effective in the movie and they work well in short bursts. There is some rough poetry being conjured in these moments and the rest of the movie can’t quite match it.

The always-reliable Ewan McGregor gives an interesting, if oddly distracting, performance here. Speaking in an American accent that is so forcefully neutral it sounds unnatural, McGregor’s Oliver invites so much pity that you may want to look away. Even in situations where he’s supposed to pretend to be cheerful, he can’t look anything but sad. “Why are you at a party if you’re so sad?” Anna asks at their precious initial encounter. Yet, she sees enough in him to offer a pity relationship.

There is one scene where Oliver and Anna act like a happy couple. That occurs at a roller rink where an employee tells them they can’t bring a dog into the building. What can they do then? Leave the premises still wearing their rental roller skates, of course. This moment when the pair refuses to comply with society’s rules is the one time that I thought they were having fun together and maybe were in love. The rest of their time together shows no emotional connection and no chemistry. There is a moment, borrowed from many better quirky romances, when they ponder their future together and accept that they don’t know what is next for them. It’s supposed to be a hopeful statement but Oliver and Anna don’t earn it. There is nothing to suggest they should be together except for the urging of the script.

Hal’s coming out is secondary to Oliver’s sadness. Whatever has changed about their relationship is very subtle and Oliver appears to have next to no reaction to his father being gay. Hal comes off as a cute cartoon of a gay man, his fashion sense stalled in the 1960s and his awareness of gay culture some years behind the curve. His lover is an angry gay man who takes every opportunity to remind us he’s entitled to the same treatment as everyone else even though no one in the movie is disrespecting him. The flashback chronicle of Hal’s final years provides a temporal framework for the movie but to what end? We always see Oliver observing his father and hardly ever engaged in his life. When all is revealed, really nothing has changed. Oliver does not have a revelation by remembering his father. In the end, he’s the same sad sack as at the movie’s start and he may want to be with Anna or maybe not.

The most intriguing character of the entire movie is Oliver’s mother, Georgia (Mary Page Keller, Gigantic), seen in flashbacks with her preteen son. In just a few scenes, she conveys dignity, complexity, loneliness, and love. You can see her frustration in her marriage but she has a lovely bond with Oliver. It is the movie’s big missed opportunity that Georgia isn’t given more attention and screen time.

Closing Statement
Beginners does a good job of portraying the state of sadness. The protagonist’s emotional withdrawal from the world and the conspicuously quiet nature of his world are well observed. However, the movie never moves past merely observing Oliver’s sadness. Consequently, I felt no connection to the character or any investment in his relationship with Anna. Director Mills puts in some nice offbeat touches like the collage-edited sequences I mentioned above. I didn’t care so much for the Jack Russell terrier that communicates through subtitles which seems like a deliberate effort to insert cuteness into a movie that’s already too self-conscious of its quirkiness. The movie falls short of delivering what’s promised by the poster’s tagline, “This is what love feels like,” and, after reading that, the little bit of throw-up in your mouth isn’t meant to be what love tastes like either.

The Verdict
5/10

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