Beginners

As part of my summer study of large dark air-conditioned rooms, I saw a movie yesterday. I convinced my mom to come see Beginners with me, knowing a movie with my mom is a movie on the house, disregarding the fact that my mom already bought me a new computer that day which I am gleefully typing away on right now!!! It’s one of those movies where I’m the youngest person in the audience, but that’s usually the case for any non-Harry Potter movie I see at Sundance Cinemas. There aren’t many interesting (or good) movies coming out this summer, so Beginners, a movie about an elderly father (Christopher Plummer) telling his son (Ewan McGregor) that he’s gay, seemed like a breath of fresh air from brain dead romantic comedies and more super hero origin stories than you can shake a radioactive stick at.

Usually I can deflect the awkward charm of indie films with my inability to suspend my disbelief, but I wasn’t prepared for writer director Mark Mill’s uncanny ability to layer melancholy onto subtlety onto more melancholy. The movie drags you down into an unhappy place and strings you along with slivers of happiness right up until the ending credits. The trailer got me expecting a fun dramedy romp a la 500 Days of Summer, but possessed too much ambiguity and depth for my mom and I to leave the theater smiling. 

“It wasn’t unrealistic,” my mom told me on the way to our boat-like Honda, “it seemed real. He wasn’t happy about taking care of his father and I think that actor did an excellent job of portraying what is was like to take care of a dying family member.” The moments when Ewan McGregor sat by Christopher Plummer’s bedside, reading to him, feeding him, shaving him, it could have represented a fear of my own mother. The fear that one day her mother or father might need that kind of treatment and she might have to make difficult decisions in their final years. My Grandparents still seem well enough to drink copious amounts of rum between every meal, so I’m hoping a situation like that doesn’t come soon. 

While walking back to the car, the only moments of the movie I could think about were the flashbacks to the father’s marriage. The depression of the mother, the montage of insincere kisses and Plummer’s character not being able to tell his own son about his sexuality until the mother died. I think I knew I was gay for most of high school, but man if I didn’t try really hard to repress it. Even with a supportive community, supportive friends and very supportive family that I knew would love me no matter what, it took me until this year to finally come out. Plummer’s character did not have any of those things and the thought that if I lived in a conservative community, with conservative friends and conservative parents, plagues my mind with a myriad concerning hypotheticals. I know that if I was born just 50 years ago, I might never have come out and would instead live a closeted life, marry blond blue eyed high school sweetheart and have beautiful blond blue eyed children that would also be thought that homosexuality is wrong. What if I was born in a community just outside of Madison? I’d grow up learning that gay people were just confused and that they’re lifestyle “choice” was morally corrupt. Would I have grown up never knowing what love felt like?

 I guess what made Beginners so ominous is that it ended without quelling any of our concerns. The only fear it put to rest at the end is that maybe Mr. McGregor’s character finally overcame his guilt and depression to extinguish his inability to commit to a gorgeous French actress played by a gorgeous French actress. Yay.