"Sometimes a film can help you locate yourself, in so much as a great one possesses within its beating heart a kind of emotional GPS. This mechanism almost works as a kind of mirror: If you are wandering about in your life, and you are perhaps a little lost, when you see this film, you find yourself represented in its mood, in the images playing out before your eyes, and in its spirit. It has the magic of autobiography, without the banal facts of one’s own life. “Beginners” had that for me. It is about the tentative and quiet nature by which love can break down a deeply ingrained inner aloneness.
On the surface, the story being told is one of a youngish man coming to terms, via exquisitely rendered flashback, with his father’s recent death to cancer. This, a few short years after the father, gorgeously played by Christopher Plummer, has come out of the closet in his eighth decade, to seek out something like love and companionship.
In the present scenes, the son, still awash in a quiet grief, meets a woman, with whom there is a deep and resonant connection, which he tries to make sense of, and allow. She, too, is of the tribe of the melancholy, but like all sad and truly optimistic people, her bravery is asserted by her willingness to offer herself to another, rather than run away into the silence of her own future. In the end, the young man recognizes that in a life which is defined by the necessity of all of us eventually losing what we love, life has only one lesson; no matter how many regrets the past may hold, it is never too late to begin again. And I suppose that what spoke to me most is the gentleness with which Mike Mills told a story about the incalculable risks of love and how much quiet courage there actually can be in a love story.
This is a film about the resonance of small things; of hands held, and walks, and a dog’s loving bark, and a lover’s glance, and just how much yearning there is in one’s day. It made me want to write films, which is very rare for me."
On the surface, the story being told is one of a youngish man coming to terms, via exquisitely rendered flashback, with his father’s recent death to cancer. This, a few short years after the father, gorgeously played by Christopher Plummer, has come out of the closet in his eighth decade, to seek out something like love and companionship.
In the present scenes, the son, still awash in a quiet grief, meets a woman, with whom there is a deep and resonant connection, which he tries to make sense of, and allow. She, too, is of the tribe of the melancholy, but like all sad and truly optimistic people, her bravery is asserted by her willingness to offer herself to another, rather than run away into the silence of her own future. In the end, the young man recognizes that in a life which is defined by the necessity of all of us eventually losing what we love, life has only one lesson; no matter how many regrets the past may hold, it is never too late to begin again. And I suppose that what spoke to me most is the gentleness with which Mike Mills told a story about the incalculable risks of love and how much quiet courage there actually can be in a love story.
This is a film about the resonance of small things; of hands held, and walks, and a dog’s loving bark, and a lover’s glance, and just how much yearning there is in one’s day. It made me want to write films, which is very rare for me."
—
Jon Robin Baitz on “Beginners” Screenplay by Mike Mills
Via Variety’s Writers on Writers Focus - Best of 2011/2012
Notes… Jon Robin Baitz, author of “The Substance of Fire,” made his Broadway debut this season with “Other Desert Cities.”
