It's a keeper
Dan Slevin
At the movies with Dan Slevin
I really don’t want much. It’s simple. All I ask is for someone with talent to take some of their life experience and merge it with that talent in the hope that the resulting work of art might help illuminate some aspect of my life. That’s all. And yet it rarely happens. Which means I’m very grateful that with Beginners, Mike Mills has done exactly that and produced a terrific film that is intensely personal - both to him and to me.
Ewan McGregor plays a gloomy Los Angelean illustrator: lonesome, introspective, self-sabotaging; all lessons learnt growing up an only child in a household where his father was a closeted gay and his mother lived a constrained and lonely life of imagination. When she dies of cancer, McGregor’s father (Christopher Plummer) is freed from the bonds of marriage, comes out at the age of 75 and throws himself whole-heartedly into the the LA gay scene - including posting revealing personal ads and starting a relationship with a budding pyrotechnician named Andy (Goran Visnjic). And then he gets cancer.
McGregor, meanwhile, is telling this story in flashback, several months after his father’s death, at the same time as he’s wrestling with a potentially perfect new relationship with a beautiful French actress (Mélanie Laurent) and working out if he can avoid wrecking it like he did the others.
That’s rather more plot than I normally worry about revealing here but it’s not a plot-ty film, though, it’s a character study and the two guys are as coherent, believable and well-rounded as anybody written in recent cinema. Laurent’s Anna is slightly less so but that’s the only flaw in a film that I found to be moving, profound, witty and humane.
Mills directs his own superb script with deftness, allowing (in fact probably insisting on) his key line in the whole film to be almost swallowed: “He didn’t give up.” That’s it. It’s what the film is about and what the previous 100 minutes have been leading up to. Every moment is important and every scene and every line connects with each other to construct a wonderfully satisfying whole.
McGregor has seemed a bit lost in recent years - since that Star Wars sojourn perhaps - but here he delivers on all that early promise and reminds us what he was all about. And Plummer, who enriches every film he appears in, is simply transcendent in this. I wholeheartedly recommend Beginners and look forward to adding it to my personal collection when the home version is available. It’s a keeper.
Steve Soderbergh’s more personal works don’t often get released to cinemas here. He announced himself back in 1989 with Sex, Lies and Videotape and for a while alternated his more commercial films such as Oceans Eleven with experimental work like Bubble and The Girlfriend Experiment. Last year’s The Informant! starring Matt Damon was a brilliant mix of the two and was therefore released but buried but by a perplexed distributor.
Contagion sits squarely on the commercial side of Soderbergh’s register. It’s a pacy, ensemble, disaster movie about a SARS-type virus mutating it’s way from bats to pigs to humans in a matter of days and then spreading so fast that no agency can prevent the deaths of millions. Soderbergh (working from a script by Scott Z. Burns and photographing the film himself under his usual pseudonym Peter Andrews) is at his capable best but you’d never call this the work of an auteur.
Deeply cynical about human motivations and resilience in a world that can turn on us in a heartbeat, Contagion is perhaps not the best film to watch when you’re feeling a bit peaky
I really don’t want much. It’s simple. All I ask is for someone with talent to take some of their life experience and merge it with that talent in the hope that the resulting work of art might help illuminate some aspect of my life. That’s all. And yet it rarely happens. Which means I’m very grateful that with Beginners, Mike Mills has done exactly that and produced a terrific film that is intensely personal - both to him and to me.
Ewan McGregor plays a gloomy Los Angelean illustrator: lonesome, introspective, self-sabotaging; all lessons learnt growing up an only child in a household where his father was a closeted gay and his mother lived a constrained and lonely life of imagination. When she dies of cancer, McGregor’s father (Christopher Plummer) is freed from the bonds of marriage, comes out at the age of 75 and throws himself whole-heartedly into the the LA gay scene - including posting revealing personal ads and starting a relationship with a budding pyrotechnician named Andy (Goran Visnjic). And then he gets cancer.
McGregor, meanwhile, is telling this story in flashback, several months after his father’s death, at the same time as he’s wrestling with a potentially perfect new relationship with a beautiful French actress (Mélanie Laurent) and working out if he can avoid wrecking it like he did the others.
That’s rather more plot than I normally worry about revealing here but it’s not a plot-ty film, though, it’s a character study and the two guys are as coherent, believable and well-rounded as anybody written in recent cinema. Laurent’s Anna is slightly less so but that’s the only flaw in a film that I found to be moving, profound, witty and humane.
Mills directs his own superb script with deftness, allowing (in fact probably insisting on) his key line in the whole film to be almost swallowed: “He didn’t give up.” That’s it. It’s what the film is about and what the previous 100 minutes have been leading up to. Every moment is important and every scene and every line connects with each other to construct a wonderfully satisfying whole.
McGregor has seemed a bit lost in recent years - since that Star Wars sojourn perhaps - but here he delivers on all that early promise and reminds us what he was all about. And Plummer, who enriches every film he appears in, is simply transcendent in this. I wholeheartedly recommend Beginners and look forward to adding it to my personal collection when the home version is available. It’s a keeper.
Steve Soderbergh’s more personal works don’t often get released to cinemas here. He announced himself back in 1989 with Sex, Lies and Videotape and for a while alternated his more commercial films such as Oceans Eleven with experimental work like Bubble and The Girlfriend Experiment. Last year’s The Informant! starring Matt Damon was a brilliant mix of the two and was therefore released but buried but by a perplexed distributor.
Contagion sits squarely on the commercial side of Soderbergh’s register. It’s a pacy, ensemble, disaster movie about a SARS-type virus mutating it’s way from bats to pigs to humans in a matter of days and then spreading so fast that no agency can prevent the deaths of millions. Soderbergh (working from a script by Scott Z. Burns and photographing the film himself under his usual pseudonym Peter Andrews) is at his capable best but you’d never call this the work of an auteur.
Deeply cynical about human motivations and resilience in a world that can turn on us in a heartbeat, Contagion is perhaps not the best film to watch when you’re feeling a bit peaky
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