There’s a lot of talk these days about how Terrence Malick’s latest film, The Tree of Life, is a “personal” film, a curious term to substitute for “autobiographical” that I take to imply a certain opacity; favorable critics seem happy to give depictions of the creation of the universe, the age of the dinosaurs, and other whatnot imagery a pass, on the theory that it means something to the filmmaker. I’m not a Malick fan; Days of Heaven gave me a good idea of what Wagner’s Ring cycle must be like for people who don’t care for late-romantic music. So I’m not one to evaluate “personal” as applied to his oeuvre. When I say that Mike Mills’s Beginners is personal, I mean that Mr Mills has pierced the carapace of autobiographical event with a sureness of touch that allows him to present his distinctly idiosyncratic outlook in an intelligible, sympathetic manner. That’s what I mean by “personal.” 

The nub of Beginners — and of Mr Mills’s life — is that his parents’ helplessly unsatisfying marriage rendered him skittish, if not paralyzed, about committing to relationships. His parents loved one another, and were faithful in their fashion. But his father was gay, and his mother, who knew this before she married him, thought that she could “fix it.” After ten years or so of childlessness, as the sexual revolution was dawning — a moment, in short, in which they might have been expected to give up on a failed, if well-intentioned experiment — they became parents. Many years later, when the mother died of cancer, the father, resolving that late was better than never, came out, and for the first time showed his son what it looked like to be him in love. The lesson came a bit late, but, as Beginners attests, it was eventually learned.

For Beginners is a movie thoroughgoingly about love. It is not about bitterness or resentment or my-parents-fucked-me-up. It’s precisely because the boy felt that his parents loved him, and allowed him to love them, that he grew up to be capable of learning not only not to make their mistakes, but to give up worrying about making their mistakes. That is what Oliver (Ewan McGregor) achieves in the course of the film, which begins a few months after his father’s death. We have a few intense scenes that take us back to boyhood with his his mother (Mary Page Keller, an actress every bit as good as her top-billed costars; the young Oliver is played by Keegan Boos), but what feels like half the of the movie features the grown Oliver and his gay, dying father (Christopher Plummer). (We’re told that Hal died four years after coming out, in his mid-seventies.) Hal has a boyfriend, Andy (Goran Visnjic), a man about Oliver’s age, but Oliver sppears to take a bigger place in his father’s everyday life, even before he bcomes very sick, than you might expect either of these independent professional men to accommodate.

Near the end, Andy nicely accuses Ollie of staying away from him — never calling or visiting — after Hal’s death because of the gay angle. Oliver is able to say right away that it wasn’t that. “It was because my father loved you so.” Again, this is said without bitterness or regret. With Andy, Hal was able to live a life that Oliver hadn’t been able to imagine, for his father or for himself. And this failure of imagination has almost cost him a very good thing, his attachment to another survivor of distubed childhood, a French actress called Anna (Mélanie Laurent).

One of the most delightful achievements of this film is the wit of its nimbly sailing through the easy part and showing, without telling, what the hard part looks like. The easy part is attraction — easy because, almost by definition, it’s involuntary. Sooner or later, a healthy relationship can be sustained only because two people want to keep it going. That’s where both Oliver and Anna have problems. They don’t know what happens when you don’t stick around instead of running away; they know only that it feels awkward and unusual. Registering this ambivalence without dimming her personal charm, Ms Laurent shows herself to be a player in the same big league in which her male costars have been headlining for years (decades, in Mr Plummer’s case). Adroitly interlacing romantic ambivalence with scenes of filial confusion (not the same thing as ambivalence), Mr Mills shows himself to be worthy of his extraordinary cast.

As it happens, I crossed Central Park to see Beginners on one of those rare summer days when the dry, diamond-hard sunlight is painfully strong. I understand that they have days like today all the time in Los Angeles — that’s why people live there. But Mike Mills’s Los Angeles is the least glamorous of hometowns. I felt quite sorry for everyone in Beginners on this point alone — what a shame, to have to live out there in all that shapeless nothing. (The jumbly banality of Sunset Boulevard is almost hard to believe.) The reek of depression that fills Oliver’s house — all the more noticeable because he’s a sophisticated graphic artist — is meant, I’m sure, to express bleak feelings about “home” that his parents’ ultimately loveless marriage inspired, but I wasn’t above attributing it to an urban environment in which style is something that, like health care, you hire professionals to provide.

I loved Beginners, and I look forward to getting to know it better over the years.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, July 1st, 2011 at 6:00 pm.