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Playing an emotionally asphyxiated illustrator whose cancer-stricken dad comes out of the closet at age 75, Ewan McGregor looks positively yummy in this gay-is-OK dramedy from the distributor that brought us The Kids Are All Right. In fact, Beginners, a semi-autobiographical movie by SoCal skater-boy-turned-graphic-designer-and-filmmaker Mike Mills, has no shortage of the adorable. It opens at Coral Gables Art Cinema this weekend.
There’s a Jack Russell terrier that speaks in subtitles, a French pixie
who doesn’t speak at all because she has laryngitis (which eventually
gives way to an ah-dor-aw-blah accent), and a scene in which the artist
and the pixie (Melanie Laurent) go roller-skating with the dog–in an
apartment building hallway, yet!
Dying old Dad (Christopher Plummer) is cute, too, hosting a party for
his new gay friends where they all watch The Times of Harvey Milk. So
Beginners might sound insufferable, but it isn’t–or at least not
completely. Mills’s second feature (after Thumbsucker) has way too many
quirks for its own good, but it works–less as the tale of a hip oldster
enjoying a much-younger boyfriend (Goran Visnjic) en route to the
cemetery than as the story of an artist who, in his own way, has only
begun to come out.
–Rob Nelson
