Beginners Movie Review: True To Life

I had seen many previews for this movie at my local indie theater prior to its release and I quickly made up my mind that I would see this film one way or another. Just from the small snippets the trailer showed, I could immediately feel the mood of the movie- it was instant. Anytime a movie can invoke feelings from the viewer, whether joy, sadness, fear, I can appreciate it that much more. The overall light-heartedness of Beginners is what was most enjoyable and it did a perfect job of making even the most serious of situations not overly depressing. Calling Beginners a tearjerker would be very accurate and I’m not going to say it made me cry but I will admit to the fact that I believe I did have something in my eye for most of the movie.

The movie follows the lead character Oliver (Ewan McGregor) who takes you on his personal journey into discovering how his life experiences, primarily the ones involving his parents, have influenced all aspects of his adult life, more specifically his personal relationships. Oliver gives us some background on himself through flashback memories of his mother, father and what it was like to be brought up in a home where his parents never seemed fully connected to one another in any way.  A lot of skipping between the past and the present happen with the main focus being on the last few years of the life of Oliver’s father, Hal (Christopher Plummer) and the short time afterwards when Oliver meets and falls in love with a woman named Anna (Melanie Laurent).

Oliver first takes us into the past to a time shortly after his mother has died. It’s here that Hal finally is able to come out to his son and reveal himself as having been a gay man his whole life despite being married to Oliver’s mother, Georgia. Four years after this event, Hal develops lung cancer and sadly passes away many months later. It’s through Oliver’s random past memories that we see the happy side of Hal’s life where he is finally able to be himself, fall in love for real and spend a little personal time with his son. As part of the process of tying up loose ends for his deceased father, Oliver acquires many of his Hal’s belongings which only really winds up being a pet Jack Russell terrier, Arthur. So far, Beginners may sound a bit melancholy but it isn’t quite that morose, I promise. One of the best parts was Arthur becoming Oliver’s tiny sidekick. Arthur brought a lot of comic relief to most situations, engaging in silent but subtitled conversations with Oliver on various occasions which seemed to elicit the majority of giggles in the theater I was in. Who doesn’t love adorable talking dogs, right?

Moving into Oliver’s present time, he meets a somewhat peculiar but very adorable Anna at a Halloween party and the two fall for each other in an instant it seems. Anna is pursuing an acting career and has never stayed in one place for too long, living in various cities around the world. Between Oliver’s negative feelings that everything in life just ends badly no matter what (as a direct result of what he encountered with his parents and then a string of failed relationships thereafter) and Anna’s total flightiness, an emotional struggle takes place that forces Oliver and Anna both to abandon what they’ve been taught throughout life and start over, or begin again.

Beginners will make you laugh. It will make you cry. In a way, it’s not just a movie but something we can all relate to: life. The struggle of dealing with the death of love ones, the excitement of meeting a new potential love for the first time and the confusion of being mentally screwed up by the people around us are all very real scenarios. And just as our real lives do, Beginners gives you those little unexpected hardships and experiences while still making you realize that it’s never too late to start again.

 

Images courtesy of Focus Films.