Watched: Beginners
- This was cute, and kept threatening something profound, but I’m not sure it ever got there.
- On the other hand, I like that I’m being trained again to read between the lines. There are a lot of silences and meaningful looks in this film, and if you switch your brain off it’s not nearly as fulfilling as if you start asking questions of it.
- Another thing worth mentioning - this film deals pretty heavily with gay identity, and talks from an outsider’s perspective about activists without condescending or becoming one. That sounds like common human decency, but it’s alarming how often both (activists and queer identities) are othered in film.
- Everyone acts perfectly, but the core of this film is the father-son relationship between Ewan McGregor’s Oliver and Christopher Plummer’s Hal. Mélanie Laurent does a good job, but a lot of the writing reduces her to a placeholder love interest with family issues. I cared about Oliver ending up with her, but not really about her.
- The soundtrack could have used some improvement, too. Too many quirky, jazzy tunes that felt generic.
- This is a brilliant film about coming to terms with loss, with a confusing romance and some fairly empty buddy comedy elements thrown in to muddle things up. It would have been more daring to just embrace simplicity, but as it is it’s… fine.