Beginners (2011)

Beginners arrives in 2010 with a premise that would later become a staple of prestige cinema: a widowed man of seventy-five comes out, takes a younger boyfriend, and dies of cancer while his son slowly learns to love. Mike Mills drew the material from his own father, which lends it a specificity that keeps the thing from drifting into the generic. Christopher Plummer won an Academy Award for the role, and the performance earns it, all twinkle and quiet dignity, a man discovering a life he had deferred for forty-four years of marriage.

The film's engagement with gay life is not decorative. Hal's coming out, his immersion in the local gay community, his romance with Andy, and the friction this creates with his son form the spine of the story. That said, the cast is overwhelmingly white, and the gay leads are played by straight actors, which places the film in a familiar early-2010s arrangement: sincere in subject, conventional in execution. The women here have interior lives, notably Melanie Laurent's Anna, but the film has no interest in gender politics as an argument. It is a romance about two people who cannot unpack their suitcases, literal and otherwise.

Elsewhere the film is silent. Race, class, climate, body image, and neurodivergence simply do not appear as concerns. The tone is reflective and soft-spoken, given to gentle voiceover observations about life, but it never mounts a pulpit. It is a personal, autobiographical work, and autobiography is not history, revisionist or otherwise. The result is a tender, well-made film that predates the era when such stories would be asked to carry an argument. It carries none, and seems content not to.