Plummer's Extraordinary "Beginners" Luck

Spreading out after two weeks of very limited big-city release, writer/director Mike Mills' dramedy Beginners is kind of an in-joke, as it's just as much about endings.

It tells the story of a 38-year-old Los Angeles graphic artist (Ewan McGregor), circa 2003, whose repressed, often-absent, retired museum-curator dad (Christopher Plummer) recently died of cancer -- after spending the last four years of his life as a cheerful, liberated gay senior, complete with a studly part-time boyfriend (Goran Visnjic) -- following the early 1999 passing of his colorful wife after 44 years of marriage. (Seen in flashbacks, and played to the hilt by Mary Page Keller, she's the kind of woman a gay man might well have been attracted to, at the risk of being stereotypical. And the movie makes clear that while their marriage was repressed, it really seems no more loveless than a lot of Greatest Generation cinema-marriages -- certainly far better than say, Don and Betty's on Mad Men, and Plummer's character genuinely felt he loved her.)

Meanwhile, just as he's mentally adjusting to the final years of his faboo, sexually active father, the commitment-challenged McGregor finds himself falling hard for a luminous French photographer with her own family baggage (the lovely Melanie Laurent). The movie features several montages of what life and popular culture looked like in the pivotal years of our characters' stories, but aside from these insert montages, the movie isn't especially visually stylish.

Yet it does subtly drive home the challenge of crafting one's identity (and re-crafting it) -- barren apartments, white-painted walls and hardwood floors, aging cars, the claustrophobia of empty spaces. There is, naturally, also a rather open Freudian jealousy between McGregor and Visjnic, as the son sees another man his age, who can love -- and more than love, who can perhaps know things about and understand -- his soon-to-die father in ways that he never will or can.

It's no spoiler to say that in its ending, while not in the same league with Magnolia or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Beginners quotes them in the right places --  and gives us a sense of relieved optimism at the final reel.

Some adult children can barely stand to see their widowed parent move on, effectively "replacing" their departed mother or father with some stranger. Others eagerly play matchmaker at the active-adult condos or the country club or the senior mobile home estates to help alleviate their widowed parent's loneliness and give them a new lease on life. But either way, it's almost always in the context of a safely reassuring, largely post-sexual, heterosexual companionship.

Who really wants to think of their 75 or 80 year old parents or grandparents flaunting their sexuality, except maybe as a punchline on The Golden Girls or Hot in Cleveland ("I don't need luck -- I've got my broom closet!") Beginners is a timely game-changer, and manages the near-impossible of remaining in good taste more or less from start to finish.

And while this movie works as pure entertainment and quality storytelling, there is most definitely a political context to it -- and one that cuts far deeper than just the campy late-in-life coming-out of a lovable gay grandpa-figure.

Beginners is on-point about the not-easy-to-take realization that -- for better or worse -- "our diversity" is not, not, NOT just the same thing as celebrating our individuality or the uniqueness of our personalities. It is also about the act of individuals coming to accept and celebrate the larger GROUPS that life has assigned us to belong to -- our race, gender, preference, generation, etc, whether we would have personally chosen to belong to those groups or not. And, I would like to add, on the group's terms -- not on one's own.

And while it may have a specifically gay context, it's also the fairly universal story of someone getting ready to say goodbye to their predictable, safe old life, and hello to an unchartable new one. When Mary Tyler Moore lost her madcap, life-of-the-party mother in 1992, she later wrote in her memoirs that she mourned for "their never-to-be-completed images of each other." We can only guess how well we measured up (or didn't), and whether they'd be cheeringly proud of us or head-shakingly disappointed in how our present lives have worked out.

Beginners makes that point crystal clear, as McGregor ever-increasingly races the clock (recalling a previous film of his, the 2003 Albert Finney/Billy Crudup father-son fantasy Big Fish) to understand just who his father really is (and was) before time is up. All of us want to feel that we're something special, that we're unique.

Beginners is a nudging, winking reminder that maybe we -- even "elite" LA, New York, San Francisco, and Paris hipsters with intellectual backgrounds and artsy conceits -- aren't quite as "unique" or special as we think we are. But perhaps partly because of that, we may be as, or even more -- wonderful and faaaabulous than we ever dreamed we could be.