The follow-up film to his feature-length debut Thumbsucker, Beginners sees director Mike Mills plumb his own life for inspiration, namely his father’s coming out as gay, aged 75, after a long marriage to his mother.

Ewan McGregor is Oliver, the grown-up son dealing with father Hal’s (Christopher Plummer) bombshell, rapidly followed by his death from cancer.
Along the way, Oliver falls in love with a suitably beautiful French actress, and forms a co-dependent relationship with a subtitled Jack Russell who repeatedly wonders if he and Oliver are “married yet”. It sounds too quirky and self-conscious to survive, but somehow it manages to come across as warm, genuine, slightly gauche and very charming, much like Oliver himself.

Beginners deftly weaves together the defining moments in Oliver’s life, such as his coming to terms with his parent’s loveless marriage, or his realisation that his past relationships have failed because he “let all of them fall apart”, with the desperate sadness of his father’s death so soon after finding true happiness, and Oliver’s realisation that instead of being sad and overthinking everything, he just needs to embrace the fact that he is free to be and love whomever he wishes.

McGregor is as watchable as ever, with his ever so slightly dodgy American accent more than compensated for by a stunning array of lovely jumpers, while ER heart-throb Goran Visnjic is great as Hal’s goofy, besotted younger man Andy. Melanie Laurent is well-cast as Oliver’s lover Anna, making the most of a role that is too flimsy and clichéd for an actress of her abilities. Unfortunately for everyone else, Christopher Plummer's performance as Hal is truly brilliant; the sort of performance that shows why he’s been in work almost constantly for over 60 years, and one that eclipses the rest of the cast, although that's not to say they don't do a jolly good job trying to compete with him. Opinionated mutt Arthur is a cute touch, and even though we don’t really like dogs, we were pretty much won over.

At the very heart of this film is the idea of hiding your true self in order to make your life easy.
Hal hides his gay sexuality in a pre-Pride era, and Oliver’s mother Georgia hides her Jewish truth in a dangerous 1938. The echoes of the gay struggle resonate in Andy, who is quick to react to any slight, real or imagined, on his sexuality.

People today, Oliver muses, are so free from the necessity to hide themselves, that we finally have time to feel sad, and to let that sadness overwhelm everything. At times Beginners borders on the navel-gazey side, but overall it is an enjoyable, sweet, tender film that deals effortlessly with falling in love, dealing with death and learning how to be happy.