There’s a genre of romantic comedy perfected by Woody Allen in Annie Hall that, when done right, can make you feel not just happy but liberated. It’s philosophical and free-form, jumping around in time, indulging in flights of fantasy like a first-person comic novel. With Beginners, Mike Mills puts himself in a league with Allen and Charlie Kaufman; his movie is marvelously inventive, and all those inventions — flashbacks, slide shows, even a telepathic Jack Russell terrier with subtitled dialogue — pull you deep into the mind of its tortured hero.
Ewan McGregor plays Oliver, a commercial illustrator who, as Beginners begins, is cleaning out the house of his late father, Hal — who, like Mills’ own father, came out as gay when his wife of more than four decades died. Hal is played in flashbacks woven all through the film by Christopher Plummer — but not the sinister Plummer you might recall from so many roles. He’s light and lithe, joyously uncomplicated, buoyed by his new life in the open.
He doesn’t brood about the past. He doesn’t worry too much that his hunky younger lover, Andy, played by Goran Visjnic, is emotionally unstable, or that he likes to sleep with other guys. When he receives the news of his terminal cancer, Plummer’s Hal silently takes it, then tells Oliver, “Let’s not rush out and tell everyone.” He’ll keep the party going until the lights go out.
Later he wonders, as his son shaves him, why Oliver can’t find happiness.
“Maybe you should take out a personal ad, where you can explain your situation,” he says.
