Let’s get this out of the way: Beginners isn’t terrible in the way a Uwe Boll movie is terrible. No, Beginners is the kind of movie that believes it’s curing your soul while slowly making your brain leak out your ears in a gentle, aesthetically pleasing drizzle. Written and directed by Mike Mills, this 2010 arthouse dribble parade is a melancholic journey through grief, love, and the LGBTQ+ awakening of a seventy-five-year-old man, told entirely through the perspective of a grown man who makes sadness look like a part-time job.
Starring Ewan McGregor as Oliver, a sad-sack graphic designer who pouts his way through every frame like a cocker spaniel with clinical depression, Beginners is based loosely on Mills’ own life, which is shorthand for: “There will be long pauses, Polaroid montages, and emotional dead zones disguised as ‘quiet reflection.’” It opens with Oliver’s father (Christopher Plummer) dying of cancer after coming out as gay at age 75—an intriguing concept executed with all the energy of a sleepy TED Talk about feelings.
The structure is nonlinear, because of course it is. We jump between timelines: the present, where Oliver meets a French actress played by Mélanie Laurent (more on her later), and the past, where he processes his father’s coming out, cancer diagnosis, and terminal wardrobe full of better-fitting clothes than anyone else in the cast. Mills stitches these timelines together with voiceovers so flat they make Werner Herzog sound like a circus barker.
Ewan McGregor, an actor of considerable charm, plays Oliver as if he’s trapped in a Wes Anderson tribute band and the only instrument left is a sad kazoo. He drifts through life like he’s allergic to joy. His design job is cold and sterile, his love life is non-existent, and his emotional range stretches from “mildly confused” to “quietly despondent.” If this man had a spirit animal, it would be a moth circling a dying bulb in a forgotten motel room.
Enter Mélanie Laurent’s Anna, a woman so manic and so pixie she bypasses “dream girl” and lands firmly in the category of “hallucination brought on by loneliness and expired Camembert.” They meet at a costume party where she’s dressed like a mime, which is appropriate, because her character speaks in half-sentences and gazes meaningfully at walls. Anna doesn’t really exist in the movie—she floats, appearing whenever the plot needs a jolt of whimsy. She and Oliver bond over their mutual inability to function like emotionally healthy adults. They lie in bed, exchange soft-voiced existential quips, and somehow manage to make falling in love feel like attending a very polite funeral.
Christopher Plummer, who won an Oscar for this role, is the only person in the film who seems to be enjoying himself. As Hal, Oliver’s newly-out father, he’s charming, warm, and actually capable of smiling—making him feel like he wandered in from another, more watchable movie. His character’s late-in-life sexual awakening could have been the beating heart of the story. Instead, it’s smothered in soft lighting and Ewan McGregor looking like he just walked out of a dream where someone erased all the vowels.
And then there’s the dog. Yes, the dog. Arthur. A Jack Russell Terrier who communicates through subtitled thoughts. Because why wouldn’t we throw in a talking dog to really drive home that this is an indie film™? Arthur is supposed to be endearing, a vessel for Oliver’s loneliness. But watching a dog’s “inner monologue” flash across the screen in Helvetica font is less emotionally resonant and more like something you’d find on a depressed Etsy account.
The film is desperate to make you feel things. It throws visual metaphors at you like emotional darts: Post-it notes of feelings, close-ups of hands barely touching, flashbacks of childhood rendered in grainy home-video tones, and cutaway montages featuring items like a typewriter, a smiling sun, or a coffee mug. These aren’t symbols. They’re Pinterest boards animated by a director who thinks subtlety means whispering in a room full of mimes.
Dialogue in Beginners exists in a state of terminal anemia. No one says anything directly. They ask questions they don’t answer. They answer questions with a shrug. They look at each other like they’re trying to decode Morse code using only eyebrows and sighs. It’s not naturalistic—it’s an emotional mime show. A scene will begin with potential and end in half-hearted shoulder shrugs and someone saying something like, “Are you always this…?” before trailing off into nothing. It’s emotional blue balls in screenplay format.
The pacing is molasses-on-ice slow. There’s no urgency, no tension, no propulsion. Watching Beginners is like staring at the cover of a Bon Iver album for 104 minutes and waiting for something to happen. At some point you realize the movie isn’t building toward anything—it’s just quietly circling the same feelings, like a Roomba stuck in the corner of a grief seminar.
And let’s not forget the score, which sounds like a melancholic xylophone being played by a woodland creature mourning the death of its forest therapist. Every cue is soft, plinky, and designed to let you know that yes, this is sad, but in a whimsical way. You are feeling now. Are you not feeling? Here’s a trumpet farting gently into a rain cloud.
Final Verdict?
Beginners is a movie about emotional honesty that is too afraid to speak in a full sentence. It wants you to cry but only if you look good doing it. It’s a sad indie boy wrapped in corduroy and irony, asking you to validate his trauma while showing you pictures of leaves and dogs in sweaters.
Watch it if you enjoy people not talking about their feelings while absolutely drowning in them. Or if you think subtitled dogs are a legitimate narrative device. Everyone else? Save yourself the time. Go stare at a Polaroid and whisper “love is hard” until you forget what a plot is. Same experience. Less mime.