BEGINNERS

If you were fortunate to have seen the trailers; choose another flick to visit. There were no secrets to discover nor surprises to behold; boredom prevailed.

You have a father/ son team; Hal, (Christopher Plummer) and Oliver, (Ewan McGregor); Hal at seventy-five has rambunctiously exited the “closet” and now romping in an alternate lifestyle, denied in his prime; Plummer is sensitive and poignantly youthful in his naive joy of discovering the delights only his dreams had requited; the paradigm for conquering and finding solace and completeness in simply being faithful to one’s essence.

Oliver is emotionally stunted, running from commitments, comparing the issues of 1953 versus 2003; he is closeted in the ambiguity of his childhood. His livelihood (I think as an illustrator), seems to be stagnating, suffocating from a vast withdrawal of intellectual, imaginative electricity. Enter Anna, (the luminously beautiful Melanie Laurent. The camera covets, strokes, adores this ethereal vision of sublimity); she floats mysteriously, peripherally, lovingly in and out of Oliver’s dull world; her attraction, an enigma, until with insight one knows that the main draw, with a role too minimal is “Arthur” the grieving, distraught, orphaned but devoted friend of Hal; the viable, reliable, richest asset of Oliver’s inheritance; a dog whose lineage can be traced back millenniums. With his absence “Beginners” plods, yawningly, to an inconclusive, unsatisfying conclusion.

TWO STARS!!

For Now………Peneflix