Fridae

Beginners is an indie film that gives indie films a good name. While being funny, quirky, and at times arty, it is also unpretentious, heart-warming, and has a humanity that easily connects with any audience. These days when many Sundance flicks have managed to subvert whatever was good and right about indie films, Beginners is proof that there are still gems out there.

Oliver (Ewan McGregor) is one very depressed graphics designer whose father Hal (performed by a scene-stealing Christopher Plummer) died of cancer shortly after outting himself at the grand old age of 75, shortly after the death of his Georgia (Mary Page Keller). Yet life isn’t about endings; it’s about beginnings. Nor are we shuffling to the end of our mortal coils but rather are beginners in grand enterprises that pop up when we least expect them.

Beginners flits back and forth between three separate timelines to tell three tales of unexpected love affairs that are presented as romantic adventures: the present day with Oliver falling in love with a mysterious foreign actress who might well be his soulmate; the immediate past with Hal finding true love in a winter-spring romance while exploring gay life and activism in his old age; and Oliver’s childhood memories of the distant past with Hal and Georgia – a closetted gay man and a closetted Jewish woman – trying their best to create a loving family despite their secrets.

Spiced with wry humour, the film is strangely life-affirming despite so much death and depression it documents. The script has a rare ability to tell an often grim tale with just enough observational humour that it takes the sting out of the pain. Of course, having a Jack Russell dog who comments on the human condition, his owner, and his owner’s relationships in subtitles helps with the cuteness factor if you’re not too fond of the dignified charm and screen charisma of Christopher Plummer as an elderly man taking to a new lifestyle with an innocent eagerness.