Perfectly adorable

Not even bad in a good way

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

McGregor is Oliver, an introverted man who works in LA as graphic designer. Plummer is Hal, his father, who "comes out" at 75, after the death of Oliver's mother and spends his remaining five years enjoying his gay lifestyle. Sound like a campy set up, but the movie is actually understated, melancholic and sweet.Hal finds a much younger boyfriend via classified ads and gets involved with the gay community, but within five years he gets cancer and dies. Plummer does a great job with his character: Hal accepts is fate with dignity to the end.The movie explores the difficult theme of losing a parent with realism. Oliver, overwhelmed by sadness is increasingly detached from life and moves as if in a trance through emotionally empty locations. Relief comes in the form of Hal's dog, Arthur, and possible love interest Anne (Laurent).The characters are emotionally stunted but clearly making an effort to connect, especially via the dog. Some sequences, like Oliver emptying Hal's house are heart-breaking for anybody who had the same experience, but also explain why Oliver is so withdrawn. The story is told in non-linear fashion, but it is easy to follow. Some of the narrative is very clever, such as the "what they looked like in year so and so", to show how our perception of life is shaped by the society we live in. One sequence reminded me of "Jules and Jim", with Anne in masculine clothes wandering around LA hand in hand with Oliver.Finally, Beginners acknowledge the fact that sadness and loss are a part of life and sometimes there is no shortcut. A new balance must be found, but it takes time and effort.

Beginners follows a young man from three different points in his life: when he's a little boy, when he was taking care of his sick father, and after his father has died. Most every performance in the movie is great. Ewan McGregor is great as the son struggling with what he should do at basically every moment of the movie, and Christopher Plummer as his sick father is convincing in how lost his character can be. Mélanie Laurent is probably my favorite performance. She plays a quirky, lovable character while still maintaining a level of necessary depth. The way the characters are written is really effective. The two leads, McGregor and Laurent, have a really authentic relationship all throughout the movie, and same with McGregor and Plummer. The dialogue is well-written and the way the story is presented proves to be an interesting, but effective, way of doing it. Not only that, but McGregor and Laurent have really good chemistry together. They play off each other so well, adding to the authenticity of their relationship. Overall Beginners is a great movie. With a solid cast, writing and directing, and even a good soundtrack, this is certainly one not worth missing. In the end I would recommend this movie.

It's absolutely, beautifully edited, and impressively written. Christopher Plummer is awesome in this. The father, son story mixed with the whole idea of his own father coming out later in his life is an interesting touch that makes Beginners stand out among other dramas out there. It's an LGBTQ friendly picture, that truly packs a punch for everyone all around. That scrappy dog is adorable too! But the problem was, any time Plummer wasn't on screen, i tuned out immediately. The romance between McGregor and the french girl bored me to death.. I apologize, I do.. It's just not my cup of tea. It's not a film I'd advise against, for anyone however. There's a lot of praise to go around.

Love, sadness, identity, grief, hope, generational divides, parent- child relationships – there are enough themes in Mike Mills' "Beginners" for a dozen films, yet they all sit in this one emotional, stirring story. Calling it messy would be accurate, but it's messy in the way life is messy.Although the sound bite summary/one-sentence pitch of this film is "a man learns that his 70-some-year-old father is gay and terminally ill," that's a somewhat gross over-simplification. The story isn't that linear, and the plot doesn't follow the son's challenges dealing with and accepting this information. Instead, it's about how a father's renaissance in the last years of his life impact a son who, at nearly 40, has yet to get a grip on his own life.Ewan McGregor stars as Oliver and Christopher Plummer as Hal, his father, who came out to Oliver after Oliver's mother passed away and started dating a younger man. Oliver, as narrator, reveals his father died four years later and the film interweaves a present day timeline following Oliver after Hal's death; memories from the four years before Hal died; and a few flashbacks to Oliver's relationship with his mother during childhood.In the present, Oliver meets a young woman named Anna (Melanie Laurent) at a party and throughout their courtship, lucid memories from timelines in the past slip in and out of Oliver's consciousness. His ability to trust and to love deeply are colored by how out of love his parents were yet also by how truly in love Hal was with his boyfriend, Andy (Goran Visnjic).It is difficult to pull apart the tangled web of love and grief and all those other factors that create an emotional stranglehold on Oliver, which is simultaneously what's so beautiful about Mills' script and most difficult. The myriad moments that comprise "Beginners" so effortlessly connect with the viewer, but sequentially, as the memories cut in and out, it can be difficult to draw the thematic linkages between one timeline and another as it fits into the organizational structure of the film.What the mind may struggle to process the heart easily latches on to in "Beginners." The acting and the on-screen relationship between characters have a powerfully genuine feel to them. Although Plummer, McGregor and Laurent all bring something to the table, Mills intuits all the right camera angles and distances and pacing that firmly places the action or dialogue into a most convincing reality. In his script, he rarely resorts to outward conflict or drama; every tension felt comes from subtext or a sense of introspection. The resulting product is a film that's as genuine as they come.Mills also uses some unexpected narrative devices in the film, primarily in the form of Oliver's omniscient voiceovers set to various images. We enter deeper into his consciousness through the visual art that he creates in his day job. He talks a lot about history and what happiness and sadness looked like at different points over the last century. This drapes an additional layer of background around a story that feels timeless and not especially obligated to history. Yet there's something quite meaningful in the way Mills ties this story to context, letting us know in an overt but creative way that context does matter in understanding Oliver's and Hal's stories.At the same time, this is yet another component making synthesis of "Beginners" a tedious process. Mills' feature debut, "Thumbsucker," also struggled a bit with thematic identity and a cohesive through- line, so perhaps it's more of a conscious choice in his own presentation style, one that wishes to break us of the need for stories that hold our hand from point to point until we reach the waters of catharsis. In fact, at one point Oliver's mother (Mary Page Keller) tells young Oliver to go in his room and scream as a way of achieving "catharsis." Oliver comes out immediately saying he doesn't have to. While intended to show how all people process anger and grief differently, the same can be said of a film. Mills provides different ways for different people to process, and while it's messy and never hits the emotional swelling point of great films, it's sure to connect.~Steven CThanks for reading! Visit Movie Muse Reviews for more