End Of The Road

Learning to share your essential self is never hackneyed.

Seeking A Friend For The End of the World (2012) is being categorized by the lazy movie reviewing press as a quirky romance with an odd setting, but it is really a road movie, in the mode of The Road and Zombieland, both fine examples of the genre.  (Heck, the old guy Homer made something pretty good out of the form in The Odyssey.)

The essence of the form is the voyage of self-discovery.  The protagonist should have a clear, specific stated goal, but in the best road stories, that evolves into a pretext, and is sometimes abandoned altogether.  Carell's Dodge (convenient name for a man who has dodged relationships?) and Knightley's Penny (who lets people devalue her) both need to see some people before the world ends (and hats off to writer-director Lorene Scafaria for not hedging that one -- it's never in doubt that the world is going to end). But they find other things on the way, naturally.  I suppose it would be obvious that they found each other, but that doesn't feel as obvious and pre-destined as it does in most films of this kind.  (Remember The Sure Thing back in the 80s?)

In this case, some goals are achieved, some abandoned, and some are discarded.  What keeps it from being predictable might be attributed to Steve Carell's nose and Keira Knightley's teeth.  Both of them are a little "off" as romantic objects, and that helps to maintain the author's intended misdirection.  (Yes, I know Knightley can be cleaned up to be stunning, but she doesn't have to look that way all the time, which is an advantage for an ambitious actress.)  I would even dispute that they are even a romantic match in this movie.  What they are is valuable companions when companionship is really needed.

And if the structure is a bit picaresque, rambling or even just plain arbitrary, well, how organized do you expect the end of the world to be?

The best reason to see this film, especially with someone who is important to you is in order to lead into that conversation about what you yourself would do given a limited time left.  I might want to be lying face to face with my SO, but I might want to be on that enchanting beach (shown in the picture above) with dozens of people and their children laughing and playing music and eating and being baptized and enjoying being alive and by the ocean and with each other and having been alive before they were dead.  That seems like an awfully good idea, and part of me wishes the movie had simply ended there.

Places (Or Why Sad is Not Unhappy)

Ewen is not paying attention to his Happiness lessons

I'm not sure if I'm right about this, but I think the title of the film Beginners (2011) is taken from the British theatre idiom by which the stage manager notifies the actors that the play is about the start.  In the States, the SM calls "Places," whereas in the UK and much of the Commonwealth, the call is "Beginners."  (This is, of course, further proof that the Brits do not understand and cannot use the language that they initiated but which, since the death of Shakespeare, they have managed to complete bungle and misuse.  The proper word should be, clearly, "Beginnings" not "Beginners," unless the theater management has decided to replace the cast at the last minute with rank amateurs.)

My point is that "Beginners" signals the time when one is supposed to start.  And although it's a start, it's a place you've been before, such as the last time you performed or rehearsed the play.  Nonetheless, you start over, fresh, as if you've never done it before, surprised, dismayed and enlightened all over again.  An actor in the theater must "lose it" over and over again, every night.  It is a state of ever-renewing innocence.

And this wise innocence informs the film, from its dark yellow palette, its Wes-Anderson-like narration, the heroine who threatens to go Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but is too smart for that pigeon-hole, even a very perceptive Jack Russell terrier, who acts as mute Greek chorus.  There is a beautiful, simple clarity which drives the stark production design, the jump cuts which are surely written into the script, the rapid shifts of place and time.  Although the texture is dense, each small piece of the mosaic is eminently clear and well-defined.



Arthur does his best to see Oliver through.

Most of all, writer (and director) Mike Mills writes with a simplicity that would warm the heart of E.B. White.  That may well because Mills and his melancholy but not neurotic protagonist, Oliver, played with a lack of self-pity by Ewan MacGregor, both experience mourning as a normal natural part of life, not to be pushed away, but not to be wallowed in, either.  (Mills previously wrote and directed Thumbsucker, an agreeably quirky indie, which offered little beneath the surface of its odd premise.)
If you've heard of the film and not seen it, you probably heard of because Christopher Plummer won an Academy Award for playing a man who comes out at age 75.  And he does it wonderfully and fully deserves prizes.  But do not skip this because you think it is an old gay man movie and you've seen that one.  This is not a movie about an old gay man, it is about a young sad man.  But sad is not depressed.  Sad is simply a color in the rainbow of emotions, one we must have in order for the other colors to make sense and maintain their relationship with each other.  Sad is OK.  The trick is to come through and come out the other end.

SPOILER ALERT:  He does it.  He gets through.  It doesn't end with a music montage and everyone splashing in the ocean, but happiness is possible.

This post has more outright expression of opinion than I like, but simply put, I found Beginners one of the most elegant, poetic and overlooked movies of 2011.  There is a lot more to see here than Plummer's rightly-celebrated turn, including Melanie Laurent's mountains of charm and Goran Visnjic's enchanting child-man as Plummer's lover, the compact of secret playfulness between young Oliver and his bemused mother, well-limned by Mary Page Keller -- these are all recognizable human beings, rare creatures in contemporary film.  But most of all, there is the emergence of Mike Mills as an authorial voice in film whose future work I, for one, intend to follow.