Beginners – review

Six years ago the American music-video director and graphic designer Mike Mills assembled a gifted cast (including Tilda Swinton, Vince Vaughn and Keanu Reeves) to make his low-budget independent feature debut – a likable comedy called Thumbsucker set in Oregon. Its hero is Justin, a troubled teenager in the Holden Caulfield mould with difficult parents. His mother (Tilda Swinton) is a psychiatric nurse dreaming of an escape to romance in the big city, his father a supermarket manager who had hoped to be a professional footballer. The diffident lad is given medication for an attention deficit disorder that temporarily transforms him into a confident near genius.

It's an interesting, truthful little film, and Mills has now followed it up with an altogether remarkable picture set at the time he was making Thumbsucker, and with an equally striking cast that features one of the greatest stage and screen actors of our time, the 82-year-old Christopher Plummer.

Beginners, as its title suggests, is about that favourite American theme of new starts, of reshaping the self, of embarking on fresh adventures after crises and life-changing experiences, and it is apparently closely autobiographical. The protagonist, Mills's cinematic alter ego, is Oliver Fields (Ewan McGregor), a 38-year-old graphic designer working in the pop music world of Los Angeles.

He is first seen sorting through his (or someone else's) possessions, getting rid of endless bottles of pills, throwing out plastic bags, in the company of an alert Parson Jack Russell terrier called Arthur. On the soundtrack is a slow, almost painfully plaintive version of Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust", a 1920s song of lost love affectionately recalled, that's followed up by similarly nostalgic music that helps set the bittersweet tone of a beguiling film.

The year very specifically is 2003, Bush is president, his photograph on the cover of Time magazine, and Oliver's father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), a retired museum director, has just died of cancer at the age of 79. Oliver's mother, Georgia, and his father, both born in the 1920s, were crucially affected by the rise of Hitler (she's half-Jewish and was brought to the States as a refugee in the 1930s; he saw active service in the US Marines during the war) and they were married in 1955, during the Eisenhower era. We're shown Ike's portrait on the cover of Time in the kind of stylised portrait favoured by the magazine in those years, very different from and less memorable than the later, blander Time.

The parents' lives are carefully presented in a context of personal and public history of family memorabilia, newsreels and romantic advertisements, and the two aspects are brought together in a key fact that shaped their lives. Hal was a homosexual in an era when few people dared confront the humiliation and ostracism visited on those who were open about their sexual predilections; he and his wife married and had a child while concealing the truth during 44 years of apparent wedded bliss. As Oliver tells us, Georgia checked in her Jewishness and Hal his homosexuality at the altar. But he asks: what did it mean to feel happy in those confident times in contrast to our own liberated era?

When Georgia (Mary Page Keller) dies in the late 1990s, Hal comes out of the closet, initially shocking his son by his frankness. Intending to be not a mere "theoretical" gay but a "practical" one, he takes advantage in his 75th year of the new climate, becoming more like one of his son's contemporaries than a member of his own conformist generation. Hal finds a younger lover, Andy (the handsome Goran Visnjic), through an encounter column, and throws himself into the gay community and its politics, though not in a particularly ostentatious manner. He then enjoys a remarkable Indian summer of happiness before stoically living with cancer in his final months.

The movie is seen through the eyes, the sensibility and the inevitably somewhat ambiguous life experience of Oliver from the year 2003. But he constantly flits back to his childhood, where his memories are mostly of his mother, a slightly bitter woman, to the past five years when he becomes close to his liberated father, and he conducts a difficult, playful affair with Anna, a young French actress (Mélanie Laurent, memorably seen in Inglourious Basterds), in the months following Hal's death.

In a funny and touching scene, the confused, grieving Oliver meets Anna at a fancy-dress party where he's dressed as an old-style shrink (presumably Sigmund Freud) and she pretends to be an analysand, thus establishing something distancing, therapeutic and slightly whimsical about their relationship. In a second-hand bookshop, Anna flashes two emblematic books at him: Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex and Liv Ullman's Changing. There is also another major character, Arthur, the dog that used to belong to his father and now converses in sage subtitles with Oliver as his new confidant.

Beginners is immensely moving, funny and involving, the acting beyond reproach, with Christopher Plummer bringing a rare wit, compassion and unsanctimonious grace to the role of Hal. In its quiet, unostentatious way, it's one of the most sensitive films I've seen about the experience of living through and responding to the profound social changes of the past 60 years.