Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
8/8/11
In The Royal Tenenbaums,
everywhere Gwyneth Paltrow’s depressed Margot goes, she’s followed by the
depressed tones of the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s "Christmastime is Here", from
A Charlie Brown Christmas, perhaps the most gloriously depressing
piece of holiday music ever composed. I couldn’t help but think of
that motif while watching Beginners, an interesting movie about
a very depressed character that in and of itself seems to suffer from clinical
depression. Ewan McGregor plays a cartoonist who at one point draws
a pair of feet marked “present” sticking out from under a giant rock marked
“past”, and McGregor excels at being stifled, depressed and self-destructively
morose throughout a plot that I suspect will be taken as more uplifting
by people who might have beaten him to that drawing than by the rank and
file filmgoer. Beginners is interesting, presents a quartet
of good actors with quality roles, and always held me at arm’s length because
it’s just so god-awful depressed. It made me want to buy writer/director
Mike Mills an ice cream cone in hopes it would cheer him up.
Oliver (Ewan McGregor) is
moving his late father’s dog into his apartment (the dog “speaks” in subtitles,
although I’m pretty sure they’re just to represent what Oliver images him
saying as opposed to what he’d actually say if he could). It’s a
lonely, Spartan, morose place, and his friends try to rouse him from his
stupor by taking him to a costume party. There, he meets Anna (Melanie
Laurent), a woman with laryngitis with whom he makes a quick, wordless
bond. Turns out she’s an actress, travels the world from location
to location, and is generally just as depressed as he is. Flashbacks
illuminate how Oliver’s relationship with his cold, distant father changed
after his mother’s death: Hal (Christopher Plummer) came out, revealing
he’d always been gay, even though he’d loved Georgia (Mary Page Keller)
to her dying day. Now, he wants to be gay for real and finds himself
a young boyfriend (Goran Visnjic) with the kind of issues that would draw
him to such an older mate. Further flashbacks show the Georgia of
Oliver’s childhood to have been a flamboyant woman ahead of her time who
was utterly crushed beneath the weight of a marriage that was never going
to give her what she wanted. Back to the first set of flashbacks;
no sooner has Hal settled into his new lifestyle than he gets very, very
bad news: he’s got cancer. We all know how that turned out,
but as we watch his final days and the way his relationship with his son
changed over that time, the question remains: can Oliver find a way
to exorcize the demons of his childhood and find a real, stable relationship
with someone just as damaged as he is?
Beginners is kinda
like The Kids Are All Right with characters
I liked: arriving via a slow, mid-range national expansion to an
art house near you at the crest of a wave of hype that suggests it’s uplifting,
inspirational, and depicts a bunch of really positive relationships.
I can’t say I really saw that movie: Hal certainly does change the
layout of his life in its last couple years, but the juxtaposition of his
coming out and cancer makes it hard to say how much he welcomes Oliver
into his life and how much he needs someone to take care of him in Georgia’s
absence. While Plummer does a very interesting job mixing in a lifetime
of frustration being trapped in the closet to a more typical chilly father
figure role, I can’t say that I ultimately found that the father/son relationship
ever got anywhere that would justify what the movie thinks it should be
teaching Oliver about taking chances and turning things around. I
know the story follows the arc of Mills’ own father’s final years, so it’s
hard to quibble without seeming like an insensitive bastard, but it would
seem the story makes more emotional sense if Hal had reformed a little
more or had been hit by a bus rather than died of a lingering illness.
I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that Beginners is an inspirational
movie for those who’ve come to terms with the idea the life is just never
gonna be all that great.
So that’s how Beginners
compares with its sales pitch. For me, it was a pitch that had very
little in common with the actual movie, which was instead a meditation
on how easy it is to let yourself believe in that giant “PAST” rock that
makes it impossible for you to grow as a person. Oliver’s relationships
are always doomed, he mopes through his father’s crisis, makes self-destructive
choices on the job, and always uses his parents’ example as a crutch to
justify it. McGregor, a master of playing sad sacks (as in the criminally
underrated thriller Deception), makes his
depression so palpable that I didn’t hold this self-defeating behavior
against him, and it is interesting to watch what it will take for the cycle
to end. Laurent has loads of charm to try to compensate for the fact
that Anna is more of an Indie Movie Type: someone whose lifestyle
suggests they’re a traveling salesperson or even unemployed, but who the
film calls an actress because the only people the filmmakers know work
in show business. I assumed with all that world travel and the fact
that none of the movie’s characters seemed to know who she was, Anna must
be making a lot of SyFy Original Movies. Her depression isn’t nearly
as developed as Oliver’s, but a dispiriting phone call from her father
and the strength of Laurent’s performance go a long way to make it more
believable than her career.
But perhaps the movie’s best
performances comes from Keller, whose Georgia acts out rather than implodes
in the face of her own broken dreams. It’s a shame she doesn’t get
to interact with any of the movie’s present-day characters, because her
unpredictability would have jazzed things up considerably. I didn’t
care for the take Visnjic had on Andy, Hal’s damaged boyfriend. Late
in the game, he and Oliver finally have a heart to heart and he asks if
Hal’s son was always so distant toward him because he was gay. While
Oliver has his own answer to that, I couldn’t help but think “Uh, I’m pretty
sure it was because you were so creepy.”
The bit with the dog is cute,
as bits with dogs inevitably are, and I liked the way Mills slices and
dices not only the narrative but also the way our quasi-narrator Oliver
lays out his worldview for us. Beginners is actually a pretty
fair job of putting depression on film, the question for potential viewers
being how inspired they’re willing to be by a movie that can claim that
achievement. I notice the top thread on IMDB’s message board for
the movie is called “It sucks the life right out of you.” That guy
was apparently not one of the people generating that positive buzz. |
