"Quirky" is an accusation that goes thrown around a lot these days. It usually goes hand-in-hand with "twee" or "precious" when someone wants to take down a film too in love with its own cleverness to drop the ironic detachment and commit to the material. I've never relied on these terms as criticisms since they can be used to describe films both good and bad. Superficially, Mike Mills' Beginners has an abundance of fanciful touches that make it sound like it belongs on the bad end of the spectrum. There is a dog who communicates with imagined subtitles, the story is interrupted for the narrator to make statements of grand simplicity about life accompanied by vintage Polaroids. The lead character is even a sad sack cartoonist, an occupation that reeks of pretentious navel-gazing. Yet Beginners never gets carried away by these conceits, using them instead to get a fresh angle on the very real joys and pains of its characters. Even the most whimsical moments in Mills' film are held down by a weight of sadness.
The story jumps back and forth in the life of Oliver (Ewan McGregor) from the present where he is taking shaky baby steps towards love with the an almost-too-lovely French girl (Melanie Laurent, heartbreakingly beautiful) to the recent past when he dealt with the late-in-life coming out and subsequent death of his father (a career-best Christopher Plummer) Through it all Mills pulls back to take the wide view. Happiness in this movie is a fragile thing that one needs courage to get and then to hold on to. Beginners is one of the most moving cinematic experiences of 2011, quirkiness and all.
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One of my favorite moment in the film was one of those montages - not the montage itself, but the main character Oliver talking about why his father chose to marry in the 1950's, and avoid a gay identity: "Because he could lose everything. This was everything." And the clips of '50's ad, cliche images that we've already seen in the film, suddenly take on a huge weight, or so they did for me in that moment. It underscores the frustrations of both parents, trying to make a life of illusions - and also highlights something about Oliver's narcissism (I like to think this is intention on Mill's part), that in risking love and relationship he's still on much safer ground and with far less to fear than his parents were. Loved this movie, btw, and I love how you've championed Keller's standout performance. the image of her standing in a doorway, frowning, after being kissed by her husband on his way to work informs the entire movie and is the single image from that film that stays with me the most.
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