Can a film about death and disappointments be charming, even droll? It’s a difficult thing to pull off, but Mike Mills has done it with just his second feature film. It helped that he had the smarts to take a chance and create an unlikely ensemble: Scot Ewan McGregor, Canadian Christopher Plummer, Frenchwoman Melanie Laurent and Croatian Goran Visnjic. The four have turned Mills’s saucy script into something special. “Beginners” takes place on two levels, the present and the past. Oliver (McGregor) still hasn’t come to terms with the death of his father, months after his passing. The illustrator ignores important portrait commissions, instead spending his days working on a series he calls “The History of Sadness.” In a quite natural way, as memories pop in and out of Oliver’s consciousness, we learn about his parents’ complicated marriage and his father’s last days. Hal (Plummer) comes out after his wife dies. But just as he begins to live — taking a younger lover (Visnjic) — he learns he has terminal cancer.
Watching his parents’ passionless marriage has made Oliver commitment-phobic. But when his friends drag him out to a party one night, he meets the luminous Anna (Laurent). “It’s embarrassing,” he tells a friend. “I’m 38 and I’m falling for a girl again.”
