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Showing posts with label beginners. Show all posts

COUNTING TO 10: The Globes - Movies

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Even though the Oscar race has had clear favorites in THE DESCENDANTS, THE ARTIST and THE HELP since last fall, the first 2 haven't sparked any huge enthusiasm among the general public, where after almost 2 months, Descendants has yet to gross $50M, and Artist, which Harvey Weinstein hasn't dared put into general release, hasn't even made $9M.  And The Help is still battling against its so-so critical reception.  So despite the fact that we all know the Golden Globes shouldn't mean anything, being the choices of around 85 obscure international writers whose opinions, for 364 days of the year, are of no interest to anyone, we've nevertheless looked to the Globes to provide some clarity.  

That being the case, what did we learn tonight?

10.  Ben Kingsley Has A Very Affectionate Wife.  When NBC cut to a woman seemingly giving Sir Ben Kingsley a lap-dance, Twitter exploded with snarky theories about who his companion was.  It turned out to be his wife, an actress who's probably entertaining offers from Starz and Cinemax for original series right now.

9.  Harvey Weinstein Could Win Awards For a Ham Sandwich.  The old joke is that any decent prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict one, but Harvey makes his hold on the Hollywood Foreign Press Associaiton pay off in gold.  In the 10 categories in which The Weinstein Company had a nominee, TWC won 6:  3 for The Artist and 1 each for MY WEEK WITH MARILYN, THE IRON LADY and--most remarkably-- a Best Song award for Madonna's dreadful W.E.


8.  Jean Dujardin's Appearances Probably Won Him Some Oscar Votes.  First there's his silent Douglas Fairbanks bit to end his acceptance speech, then he leaps into a little dance as the telecast cuts to commercial, and in case all that wasn't cute enough, when The Artist wins Comedy/Musical, he's the one with the adorable dog.  If you're vying against George Clooney, Hollywood's King of Charm, you need every trick you can get...

7.  Stars Count At the Globes.  Exhibit A:  Madonna.  Exhibit B:  Steven Spielberg, taking Best Animated Film for THE ADVENTURES OF TININ just because he wasn't going to win anything for WAR HORSE.  (But at least A SEPARATION managed to win Best Foreign Film over Angelina Jolie's picture.)

6.  The HFPA Isn't Thrilled With The Artist Either.  3 of the 4 categories The Weinstein Company lost were defeats for Artist:  Director (Martin Scorsese for HUGO), Screenplay (Woody Allen for MIDNIGHT IN PARIS), and Supporting Actress (Octavia Spencer for The Help), with Supporting Actor going to Christopher Plummer for BEGINNERS rather than Kenneth Branagh for My Week With Marilyn.  And 2 of the 3 awards Artist won (Picture and Actor) were in Comedy/Musical, where under Globe rules, it didn't have to face off with any of the heavier Dramatic competition.  (The only exception was the meaningless category of Best Score.)  The message:  they liked Artist a lot--but they didn't love it.

5.  The HFPA Might Want to Keep Its Earlier Awards Quiet.  Jessica Lange won Best Actress for King Kong?  Really?  It might be a good rule of thumb not to mention any Globe winners from the pre-Pia Zadora erea.

4.  Brad Pitt's Loss Was Meaningful.  Pitt has his work cut out for him trying to get the Oscar against Clooney and Dujardin, especially because MONEYBALL, although it might get nominated, isn't a serious contender for Best Picture, and its director Bennett Miller didn't get a DGA nomination and may not do better with the Oscars.  A Globe win would have been extremely helpful.

3.  Ricky Gervais Can Be As Bland A Host As Anyone.  For all his and NBC's hype of how outrageous he was going to be, Gervais didn't say anything remotely shocking or insulting in the entire telecast, and his "A" material was at the level of mentioning "Jodie Foster's Beaver."  Even what would have been his one sharp bit of asking Johnny Depp if he'd ever actually seen The Tourist was undercut by the fact that he'd just said that his buddy Depp guest stars on his new HBO series.  Given Gervais's limp material, Madonna's shot at his bow that likened kissing him to kissing a woman seemed nastier than anything Gervais had to say.  (The best zinger of the night actually came from Seth Rogen, noting as he read the Best Comedy/Musical Actress nominees that Michelle Williams was in "that hysterical comedy" My Week With Marilyn.)

2.  The Help's Loss At the Globes Doesn't Mean Much.  With the HFPA's foreign sensibilities, The Help isn't exactly their style.  (A loss for The Descendants, though, would have been crippling for that film.)  Much more important will be the SAG and PGA Awards. 

1.  The Oscar Race Is Still Open.  At this point, The Artist, The Help, The Descendants, Hugo and even Midnight In Paris could all still have a legitimate shot at Oscar, as could Clooney, Dujardin and Pitt for Actor, and Streep, Williams and Viola Davis for Actress.  Consider the Globes tonight's equivalent of the New Hampshire primary:  it confirmed most of what we already knew, but didn't resolve much.

Next up:  the Producers Guild Awards on January 21.

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SHOWBUZZDAILY 2011 IN REVIEW: THE HONORABLE MENTIONS

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It's actually harder to come up with a manageable list of Honorable Mention movies than a Top 10, because there are so many films that are eminently worth seeking out and seeing, but perhaps a little bit flawed--sometimes too thin, sometimes too audacious for their own good.  It wouldn't have been much of a stretch to add 10 more to the very worthy titles listed (in alphabetical order) below:

50/50:  Writer Will Reiser turned his own serious experience with cancer into a satisfying, perceptive comedy-drama, with earned laughs and a minimum of sentimentality.  Terrific performances by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Seth Rogen (playing a version of himself--a friend of Reiser's, he was also one of the film's producers), Anna Kendrick and Bryce Dallas Howard, and unmannered, self-effacing direction by Jonathan Levine.

BEGINNERS:  Mike Mills' semi-autobiographical tale of a man (Ewan McGregor) whose elderly dad (Christopher Plummer) comes out of the closet after decades of marriage and is then stricken with cancer was quirky (the subtitled dog) but also grounded in real emotion, and a seamless exercise in jumping between timeframes and moods.  Plummer deserves all the year-end honors he's getting, and McGregor and Melanie Laurent, as the new love in his life, were splendid.

BELLFLOWER:  The craziest, most exciting writing/directing debut of the year, Evan Glodell's fantasia was about pop culture, apocalyptic fantasy, doomed romance and fatal friendships.  It was all too much and too strange and sometimes miraculously brilliant.

CERTIFIED COPY:  A writer (William Shimell) meets a fan (Juliette Binoche), she takes him sightseeing, and as a lark they pretend to be a longtime couple--or was the pretense that they just met?  Abbas Kiarostami's exploration of shifting identities and realities is utterly different from the neorealist stories of his native Iran that made his reputation, an eloquent and probably unsolvable intellectual game.


CONTAGION:  The good news is that just when Steven Soderbergh seems to near his deadline for early retirement, he adds another project to his list.  Contagion was the scariest movie of 2011, a matter-of-fact, all too believable piece of fiction about a random virus that kills millions of people in mere weeks.  Even an uneven script (the Jude Law and Marion Cotillard episodes didn't work) and an all-star cast couldn't minimize the creepiness of the film's flawless semi-documentary execution.

THE DESCENDANTS:  Not as insightful or accomplished as its fans claim, but still a very good movie.  Alexander Payne's comedy-drama sacrifices believability for the star power of George Clooney and some easy gags, and it bogs down in a predictable, banal subplot.  The dialogue and performances, though, are mostly quite fine.

THE DOUBLE HOUR:  A couple meet at a speed dating night, and robbery and murder ensue.  But is that really what's going on?  Giuseppe Capotondi's romantic thriller was the twistiest, trickiest dazzler of the year, and one that mixed genuine emotion with its structural gamesmanship.  

DRIVE:  Nicolas Winding Refn's thriller was spectacularly well shot and edited, beautifully performed by a cast that included Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston and especially the career-redefining Albert Brooks, and about absolutely nothing but its own devotion to the subgenre of 1970s moody action films.  As pastiches go, though, it was far less vapid than Super 8 or ponderous than War Horse.   

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS (PART 2):  A worthy conclusion to the best franchise of the decade.  Not quite the jewel that chapters 3 and 4 were, but director David Yates, screenwriter Steve Kloves and the gigantic cast do J.K. Rowling's spectacular finale proud.

HIGHER GROUND:  A genuine rarity:  Vera Farmiga's directing debut, written by Carolyn S. Briggs and Tim Metcalfe, is a truly serious American movie about religion, its comforts and limitations.  Farmiga's performance was of course luminous, and she proved herself a strong, intelligent director of other actors (including Joshua Leonard, Dagmara Dominczyk, John Hawkes, and her own sister Taissa Farmiga) and exceptionally challenging material.

HUGO: Martin Scorsese isn't Ernst Lubitsch, and the portions where he tried to achieve that kind of effortless light touch were weak.  But the last section of the film, with its heartfelt salute to Georges Melies, one of the founders of cinema, and Scorsese's superbly crafted embrace of the latest in 3D technology (much in Melies's spirit) were exhilarating.

LIKE CRAZY:  Drake Doremus's highly improvised film owed a huge amount to its stars Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones (and in a smaller role, Jennifer Lawrence), but its beautifully captured tone of fragile and desperate young love was its own.

MARGARET:  Kenneth Lonergan's cursed, long-delayed, still-not-finished post-9/11 drama doesn't hang together, and we may never know if it possibly could have (unless Fox Searchlight sets it free for a Criterion homevideo release).  It's tantalizingly close to brilliance, though, a narrowly-etched epic about teen idealism, selfishness, guilt and narcissism as embodied in Anna Paquin's remarkable performance, and the deeply troubled adults who surround her.

MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE:  Elizabeth Olsen gave one of the year's truly breathtaking performances as a cult escapee, but no one went to see Sean Durkin's troubling, difficult, constantly-shifting drama.  John Hawkes' work as the cult's leader was even more frightening than his Oscar-nominated role in Winter's Bone. 


MELANCHOLIA:  The first half of big-mouth Lars Von Trier's epic was excellent dark comedy about a truly terrible wedding, sparked by a lovely performance by Kirsten Dunst.  The second was a moody end-of-the-world saga that partook a bit too much of European art film cliches.

A SEPARATION:  Asghar Farhadi's brilliant Iranian drama is the story of a collapsing marriage, class struggle, religion, the impossibility of true justice, and ever-so-subtly, that country's contemporary politics.  It's a deeply human story that manages to be incisive, emotionally complicated and a window on a very alien culture all at once.

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY:  Fitting John LeCarre's legendarily complicated story into 2 hours was a Rubik's cube of a challenge, and Tomas Alfredson's film, written by Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughn, pulled it off--the only drawback was that having managed that feat, there was little room for the depth and nuance that made the novel and BBC dramatization into classics.  Gary Oldman, almost but not quite eclipsing the memory of Alec Guinness, headed a great British cast,

THE TREE OF LIFE:  Ah, Terence Malick!  Gorgeous, fabulously realized images of a Texas childhood, brilliantly performed by Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain and Hunter McCracken-- mixed with incredibly pretentious, flat-footed footage of dinosaurs, the formation of planets, and Sean Penn looking glum.  The year's most starkly mixed bag.

TYRANNOSAUR:  Nobody's idea of a fun night out at the movies, but Paddy Considine's directing debut, a paean to human misery and the search for love, featured towering performances by Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman and Eddie Marsan.

X-MEN:  FIRST CLASS:  Matthew Vaughn's prequel was itself the class of this year's superhero movies, a daring mix of CG magic and the Cuban Missile Crisis that was hurt only by Kevin Bacon and January Jones's lackluster villainy.  The exceptional cast included James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Rose Byrne and Nicholas Hoult.

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STATUETTE STAKES: National Board of Review Has Its Day

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The National Board of Review is an organization with a virtually unknown membership that exists in public consciousness for precisely one day per year, and this is their day:  the announcement of their film awards.  Their claim to fame, such as it was, came from being the first ones out of the awards gate--but this year the NY Film Critics Circle stole their thunder by revealing their picks 2 days ago.  So there's not much reason to give the NBR choices much credence in terms of the bigger race.  Having said all that, they've made some interesting and worthy choices that are very different from NYFCC's.  Below are the NBR selections and some thoughts:


Best Picture:  HUGO. 

Best Director:  Martin Scorsese, HUGO.  These awards are crucial to Hugo, which is attempting the difficult feat of coming into the market as a family entertainment and staying there as a critically acclaimed player in the Oscar game.  The film is adding theaters this weekend, and hopes to keep expanding through December.

Best Actor:  George Clooney, THE DESCENDANTS.  Certainly no surprise, but officially puts Clooney into the race. 

Best Actress:  Tilda Swinton, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN.  A great performance in a very difficult film that's only getting a 1-week Oscar qualifying run in a couple of theatres this month.  Swinton and the film desperately need some awards momentum to get any kind of audience for this picture.

Best Supporting Actor:  Christopher Plummer, BEGINNERS  As with Clooney, this is a pro-forma introduction of Plummer into the race.

Best Supporting Actress:  Shailene Woodley, THE DESCENDANTS  A definite help to Fox Searchlight's hope to get Woodley an Oscar nomination for this role.

Best Original Screenplay:  Will Reiser, 50/50  An unexpected but very welcome choice, as this is an excellent script that hasn't been getting much attention.

Best Adapted Screenplay:  Alexander Payne, Jim Rash & Nat Fason, THE DESCENDANTS  Certainly one of the frontrunners along with Moneyball.

Best Animated Film:  RANGO  NYFCC apparently didn't find any animated film this year worthy of an award, which was bizarre in a year that gave us this exceptional picture.

Best Foreign Language Film:  A SEPARATION  A groundswell beginning to develop?

Best Documentary:  PARADISE LOST 3:  PURGATORY.  On the official Oscar short-list for this category.

Best Debut Director:  J. C. Chandor, MARGIN CALL.  Some more well-earned attention for a very dark horse in the race.

Best Ensemble:  THE HELP  The other organization that gives this award is the critically important Screen Actors Guild (actors form the largest single group of Oscar voters), and DreamWorks/Disney will be beating this drum loudly.

Breakthrough Performances:  Felicity Jones, LIKE CRAZY; Rooney Mara, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO  Consider these "they're here too" runner-up awards for Best Actress  The Mara award is important because it's the first indication Dragon Tattoo (a very violent genre movie, despite its pedigree) and its star could be awards contenders.

"Spotlight" Award:  Michael Fassbender.  Another runner-up award.

The NBR also announces catch-all lists of the Best Films, Foreign-Language Films, Independent Films and Documentaries, so no one (well, hardly anyone) goes away empty-handed.  They are:

Best Film:  THE ARTIST, THE DESCENDANTS, DRIVE, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 2, THE IDES OF MARCH, J. EDGAR, THE TREE OF LIFE, WAR HORSE

Best Independent Film:  50/50, ANOTHER EARTH, BEGINNERS, A BETTER LIFE, CEDAR RAPIDS, MARGIN CALL, SHAME, TAKE SHELTER, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

Best Foreign Language Film:  13 ASSASSINS, ELITE SQUAD 2:  THE ENEMY WITHIN, FOOTNOTE, LE HAVRE, POINT BLANK

Best Documentary:  BORN TO BE WILD, BUCK, GEORGE HARRISON:  LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD, PROJECT NIM, SENNA

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Box Office Results Footnotes - July 24

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With the superpowers wielded only by Hollywood studio estimators, CAPTAIN AMERICA:  THE FIRST AVENGER has leaped ahead of Thor to claim the biggest superhero opening of the year.  But Captain America and HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS (PART 2) are the only pictures in the Top 10 predicting a Sunday drop of less than 20%, so we'll see tomorrow if those numbers hold up.  (By way of comparison, Thor fell 28% on its first Sunday.) 


TRANSFORMERS:  DARK OF THE MOON has hit $882M worldwide, which makes it the most globally successful of the series (even though domestically it won't come close to the Transformers 2 gross--despite 3D ticket prices).  The film just opened in China, where authorities still ration out US films, and had a giant $40M weekend, and it doesn't open in Japan until next weekend, so it should join the global $1 Billion club.  (Harry Potter will be permitted its China opening in early August.)

FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS will be the only R-rated summer comedy so far this season not to reach $100M, although for a moderately budgeted film it will still do well enough.  Reports are that it's been skewing female and slightly older than expected (the audience is mostly 25+), which would suggest a leggy run... if Crazy Stupid Love weren't opening on Friday.

On the indie front, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS continues to astonish:  after a 10 week run, and losing 12% of its theatres, it went up this weekend.  The runner-up indies of the season, TREE OF LIFE and BEGINNERS, continued to be rock solid, with Tree down only 10% from last week and Beginners basically dead-even (although Tree's $11M gross is still just a slice of its $30M cost, while Beginners $4.6M is already over its $3.2M production budget).  On an even smaller scale, the miniscule, marvelous THE TRIP (basically 2 funny English guys driving through the countryside and haranguing each other) has grossed $1.2M, a very good number for such a tiny picture, while the documentary BUCK has already reached $2.6M (both these movies are from IFC).  The Weinstein Company's SARAH'S KEY had a good opening of $23K per theatre at 5, while Fox Searchlight's less mainstream ANOTHER EARTH was right behind with $20K at 4.

Somewhat surprisingly, the first trade reviews for COWBOYS & ALIENS are very solid, so its reportedly weak tracking may improve through the week.  The terrific CRAZY STUPID LOVE should also benefit from good reviews (its early Rotten Tomatoes number is 83%).

Be sure to look for Mitch Metcalf's Actual Boxoffice and International analysis as soon as numbers are available. 

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A MIDSUMMER STUDIO'S REPORT CARD: Universal

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With a summer movie season bracketed by the first weekend in May on one end, and Labor Day on the other, we've reached the midpoint of 2011's array of blockbusters, and for the next week, here at SHOWBUZZDAILY, we'll be providing our judgments on how the studios are doing.  US Grosses and Overseas Grosses are as of July 10, 2011.

Today:  Kabletown Studios



MOVIES IN RELEASE

FAST FIVE
US Release:  April 29
US Gross:  $208,769,000
Overseas Gross:  $392,831,354
Worldwide Total:  $601,600,354

BRIDESMAIDS
US Release:  May 13
US Gross:  $158,186,000
Overseas Gross:  $48,500,000
Worldwide Total:  $206,686,000 

BEGINNERS (Focus Features)
US Release:  June 3
US Gross:  $2,697,327
Overseas Gross:  n/a (Focus only controls certain territories)
Worldwide Total: n/a

LARRY CROWNE
US Release:  July 1
US Gross:  $26,526,000
Overseas Gross:  $8,400,000
Worldwide Total:: $34,926,000

THE MONEY
 
Universal's summer score comes with a big asterisk:  properly speaking, FAST FIVE's April 29 opening placed it outside Hollywood's "summer."  Deleting that $600M from its numbers would make quite a difference.  But since the film opened just a week before the summer's "official" start with Thor, it was marketed as a summer movie and had the bulk of its playing time during summer, it (sort-of) counts.  Financially the picture was a bonanza, the franchise's highest grosser both domestically and overseas, and a particularly huge hit internationally--it could end up doubling the second-highest overseas gross of the series.  (Needless to say, a sixth installment is on the way.) 

BRIDESMAIDS is a much smaller hit, but an even bigger surprise for the studio:  the low-budgeted R-rated comedy with no stars has turned into the biggest smash ever from Judd Apatow's production company, and kicked off a summer of R-rated comedy success.  Since no one except Apatow will get a large back-end on this picture, there should be plenty of profit for the studio.

LARRY CROWNE is a flop, but Universal was strictly a distributor on it, with no financial investment beyond marketing costs.  Even so, the picture  may take a while to hit breakeven, but Universal is in much better shape than the film's financiers.

On the limited release side, BEGINNERS is taking its time expanding beyond art houses--this weekend it added 47 theatres for a total of 155, and saw its per-theatre gross decline to a still-acceptable $3500 or so.  If it can play out the rest of the summer, it could develop into a modest success. 

THE QUALITY

Fast Five successfully pushed the franchise into the heist genre, and may have had the smartest casting idea of the summer by adding The Rock to the movie's crew.  The result wasn't brainy, but it was fun.

Showbuzzdaily was in the minority on Bridesmaids (89% positive on Rotten Tomatoes), which was undeniably enjoyed by vast numbers of moviegoers.  Director Paul Feig, writer/star Kristen Wiig and her co-stars are all big talents, so more power to them.  Larry Crowne, on the other hand, was a misfire that left a bad aftertaste.

Beginners is a marvelous, very little movie that probably won't reach a wide audience, but is at least being seen. 

STILL TO COME

COWBOYS & ALIENS - July 29:  Universal can't seem to figure out how to sell this big-budget, high-concept whatsit.  There have been multiple trailers, some playing up the western genre, some the star power of Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, others the scifi special effects.  That kind of muddled sell usually doesn't help at the boxoffice.

THE CHANGE-UP - August 5: Jason Bateman's new hit with Horrible Bosses may boost this R-rated body-switch comedy, which seemed doomed after Ryan Reynolds failed to thrill anyone as the Green Lantern.  Although it follows Friends With Benefits and Crazy Stupid Love in the summer line-up, this one could skew more to a male audience.   

ONE DAY (Focus) - August 19:   This initially seemed like a no-brainer:  Anne Hathaway in a romantic comedy drama based on a bestselling (and extremely good) book, from the director of An Education.  The decision to push opening day from midsummer to the last couple of weeks before Labor Day doesn't bode well, though.  

MIDSUMMER GRADES:

THE MONEY:  Split grade -- B+ if Cowboys & Aliens succeeds, C+ if it flops.

THE QUALITY:  C+, higher for the rest of the world that loved Bridesmaids.

Click HERE to read the other studio report cards.

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Box Office Footnotes - June 11

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We'll see if SUPER 8 gets to $40M, but in any case Paramount has done the season's best job of managing expectations.  Considering that they've been throwing millions into promoting the movie since the Super Bowl, the idea that the lowest action opening of the summer is somehow good news is a beautiful piece of spin.  Remember that although Super 8 is low-budget by blockbuster standards, it still carries the typical $150M+ in worldwide marketing costs, which puts profit a distance away.--and the B+ average it got from Cinemascore is nothing to sing about, especially since the opening night audience for this should have been pure fanbase.

The X-MEN:  FIRST CLASS hold is disappointing.  This is a high-quality movie that should have benefitted from strong word of mouth, but the combination of the 1960s setting and the no-star cast seems to have turned some audiences off.  It could wind up as the lowest-grossing title in its franchise.

Similarly, Hangover, Kung Fu Panda and Pirates are all heading for the lowest grosses (domestically) of their respective series, although Kung Fu had a nice 3rd week hold--deservedly so.

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS saw its per-theatre number come down to earth to around $5500 as it expanded swiftly to nearly 1000 screens--but I'm sure Woody Allen isn't complaining, since even with average holds, it should match Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Match Point as one of his most successful films of the past 25 years.

TREE OF LIFE is expanding more slowly, up to only 47 theatres, and it's holding pretty firmly at around $17K per theatre.  Same for BEGINNERS, which inched up to 19 theatres and should do around $12K in each.  

Next weekend we get the questionable GREEN LANTERN and the for-kiddies-only MR POPPER'S PENGUINS (which, in an odd piece of scheduling, is only getting 1 week of free play before Pixar invades with CARS 2 the following week). 

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LIMITED RELEASE: "Beginners"

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Worth a Ticket:  A funny, moving story about navigating the twists of life.

 
Mike Mills' BEGINNERS is about the fumble for love, the wrong turns and mistakes that can delay--although luckily not always prevent--true happiness.  Mills has said that this story is semiautobiographical:  like his protagonist Oliver (Ewan McGregor), Mills learned after the death of his mother that his 75-year old father (Hal in the film, played by Christopher Plummer) was and had always been gay.  Uncloseted at last, Hal, like Mills' father, lived as an openly gay man for the last years of his life, finding love with the younger Andy (Goran Visnjic) before succumbing to cancer.  


Beginners takes place along 3 simultaneous timelines in Oliver's life, intercutting between them:  his childhood relationship with his mother Georgia (Mary Page Keller), who was troubled and dissatisfied for reasons Oliver would only come to understand decades later; the period after her death when he became closer to his father as his dad happily explored his own sexuality; and shortly after his father's death, as Oliver enters into a relationship with a beautiful French actress, Anna (Melanie Laurent).  As the movie develops, we see how each period of Oliver's life affected the next, and the ways echoes of his youth have shadowed his adulthood.  He comes to understand that neither of his parents did anything wrong, exactly, and certainly not to hurt him; they were just trying to live within the strictures of their times and upbringing (Oliver gives us mini-documentary slideshows within the film to tell us about the differences and similarities of the eras).  Still, it's all affected him in ways he'll need to move beyond if he's to have fulfilling relationships of his own. 

Mills has come a long way from his pretentious debut Thumbsucker (which was based on a novel rather than his own material).  Beginners flows beautifully between its chronologies, with humor and imagination--once Oliver has inherited Hal's lovable Jack Russell terrier, the dog occasionally makes his (subtitled) observations known to Oliver.  All the characters are layered--even Andy and Anna, who could have been pure fantasy figures for their respective men, have their own issues, rooted reasons for the ways they act.  Mills presents them all with compassion and generosity.  The actors give lovely performances.  McGregor can be a weak presence in some films, but here that drifting quality works well for Oliver, while Plummer does some of the most likable work of his career; Laurent, who played the Jewish partisan Shosanna in Inglourious Basterds, brings shadings of darkness to Anna.  Mills' understated, effective use of music, by Roger Neill, Dave Palmer and Brian Reitzell, is also notable 

There are innumerable traps in making a gentle, eccentric film like Beginners, and Mills has sidestepped most of them.  It's a quietly moving, illuminating story about the ways in which we're formed, and the possibility that we can learn to live beyond them.  

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