Beginners

Mike Mills’ followup to Thumbsucker, Beginners, which unfolds in both the past and the present, details an artist’s (Ewan McGregor’s Oliver) relationships with a quirky actress (Melanie Laurent) and his ailing (and recently out-of-the-closet) father (Christopher Plummer). Mills’ unabashedly avant-garde tendencies stand as the most obvious impediment to Beginners‘ wholehearted success, as the film boasts plenty of positive attributes that are essentially suffocated by Mills’ oddball directorial choices. It’s worth noting, however, that there’s still plenty here worth embracing, as all three of the film’s stars deliver subdued yet impressively authentic performances that prove impossible to resist (and this is to say nothing of the meet-cute that ensues between McGregor and Laurent’s respective characters, with the moment ranking as one of the best of its kind to come along in quite some time). But Mills’ reliance on as meandering a structure as one could envision is inevitably exacerbated by the film’s almost oppressively deliberate pace, and it does go without saying that the pervasively uneven atmosphere is essentially heightened by the ongoing emphasis on off-the-wall elements. It’s a shame, really, as Mills undoubtedly has a strong eye for realism, with the progression of McGregor and Laurent’s relationship ultimately coming off as an impressively vivid portrait of one couple’s journey from first encounter to eventual domesticity (yet, by that same token, this hardly seems like the kind of story that calls out for a fake break-up). Likewise, the emotional stuff involving Plummer’s character feels awfully real – which finally ensures that Beginners‘ positive elements, more often than not, manage to outweigh its almost pervasively pretentious sense of style.

**1/2 out of ****