Review: "Beginners"

     Beginners is a slow drama about a young man dealing with the death of a parent, finding love, and trying not to remind himself that he is in his 30s with a life to get on track.  When I call it a "slow drama", I don't neccessairly mean it as a bad thing - the momentum of the film, however laggard, is carried and paced well by solid writing, a quirky score, and great acting.  And a scraggly terrier dog with subtitles.

      Ewan McGregor stars as Oliver, a loner whose world is rocked when his mother passes away and his father announces he is and always has been gay, and that he has a young lover.  That doozy of an announcement is soon followed by Oliver's father (Christopher Plummer) developing Stage 4 terminal cancer.  It doesn't sound like a funny film at all, but it has numerous moments of subtle humor that keep the film light and coherent amidst a somewhat somber and non-linear plot.  Oliver certainly seems to accept his father's life style and choices over his own, and his life continues to get more complex after meeting a quiet and independent foreign girl named Anna (Melanie Laurent from Inglorious Bastards) who is similar to Oliver - lonely, but afraid to do anything about it.  The on-screen chemistry and adorableness of their relationship eventually matures into an adult partnership, with serious discussions and montages of yelling that create a level of believability that sometimes seems immune to offbeat indie films.

      Oliver's journey throughout the film is accompanied by a simple yet grand piano score; the abstract narrative paired with part hilarious, part disturbing photos will probably seem pretentious and boring to inexperienced movie-goers and people looking for a plot and characters a little louder than Beginners has to offer.  But trust me, I have seen pretentious films, and this is not one of them.  It's touching and sad and funny all at the same time, and shows us when it comes to love and marriage and death and life, we are all amateurs.

(img sources = screenjunkies.com / freemoviecodes.blogspot.com)