It’s the cyclical nature of media in the TikTok age that, inevitably, old favorites will reemerge and enter the conversation again. This was recently the case with 2010’s Beginners, a film starring Ewan McGregor as an illustrator named Oliver, who is coping with the loss of his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer). For most of his life, Hal hid the fact that he was gay, and only came out following the death of his wife. He spent the next four years of his life proudly out, up until the day he passed.
When this film first came out, I was 11 or so, and while I didn’t completely understand it, I knew that it was a film I wanted to understand better. Just like with Frances Ha, I considered it a favorite film without fully absorbing the gravity of it. How could I? Though I’d already experienced death and mourning a few times over at that age, there are some things that are simply lost on a young kid.
One thing that wasn’t lost on me, however, was the love and pain of caring for queer loved ones during times when such care wasn’t quite as normalized. Without getting too into it out of respect for my loved ones’ privacies, my family has its own queer history. Unfortunately, some relatives are no longer with us, so I’ve come to learn and love them through the lens of others. And in this process, I remember resonating, even as a kid, with Oliver’s love and grief for his father, with all the complexities that such feelings entailed. As such, I have always considered Beginners a very queer movie.
However, “queer” itself is a term and concept that’s changed quite a bit over the years, and fittingly, the culture has changed, too. And after reading some criticisms on the film To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything!, the likes of which claimed the film reduced its LGBTQ+ characters to “fairy godmothers” for us to snicker at, I wondered if I could still call Beginners a truly “queer” film. After all, the premise of the film is that Hal’s coming out, and eventual death, inspires his son to finally step out of his comfort zone and really try to find love in his life. This was all lost on me as a kid.
So, I decided to rewatch it after many, many years. My takeaway, in short, is that it’s not at all such an allegedly exploitative story—but, more on that below.
The Bravery of Becoming
Beginners is an incredibly introspective, contemplative, and nostalgic film. Oliver himself is a lonesome, introspective sort of person, so his occasional narration is at once widely encompassing and somewhat mournful. They take this sort of viewfinder approach as seen in the trailer:
As can be seen, he’s incredibly fixated on how things were, compared to how they are now. One poignant scene in this style (which I unfortunately can’t find on YouTube) reflects on his parents’ upbringings, and how they could never quite afford to be who they wanted to be. As a result of this, they spent most of their married lives with an air of restraint and coldness. Oliver’s mother, Georgia (Mary Page Keller), was half-Jewish during WWII, and spent most of her young life trying her hardest to hide that fact. Part of what drew her to Hal was this mutual understanding that they were othered.
Unfortunately, this was never going to be conducive to an especially liberating marriage. Hal often had extremely quick, private affairs, while Georgia spent most of her time with Oliver, often playing strange, silly games, such as pretending to shoot each other or driving aimlessly through the city. Oliver, for his part, grew up knowing his father as this cold, taciturn person, because that’s who Hal naturally had to become in order to hold onto what he’d always been told he needed to hold onto in order to survive: a “traditional” family. Oliver was constantly made aware of his shortcomings through Georgia, who often complained to a young Oliver about her husband.
Learning that his father was gay, and so quickly after his mother’s death, came as a shock to Oliver. What was even more shocking was how his father was suddenly this jubilant, excitable person, after years and years of emotional distance. Hal started putting out ads for partners, going out to nightclubs, and even developed a rotating set of boyfriends whom he hung out with regularly. All the while, Oliver struggled not with Hal’s homosexuality, but with the concept that one could live such a profoundly heartbreaking lie for so much of his life.
This particular clip, I think, says it all:
As Oliver learns all of this about his father, and his father’s relationship with his mother, he is thrown for a loop—and his foremost feeling is guilt. That guilt forces him to reexamine all that his father has ever done with his life, and all that he had to quietly live through. To make up for this guilt, Oliver begins to involve himself more in his father’s life; and to make up for lost time, Hal starts living a lot of life.
For the next four years, they grow closer than they’d ever been, with Oliver becoming a de facto part of Hal’s new social life, and bearing witness to Hal’s loving relationship with a younger man, Andy (Goran Višnjić). As Hal’s health deteriorates, and we watch his death through various scenes, we understand two things: that Hal’s life has ultimately been fulfilling for him, and he can die content; and that Oliver is forever shaken by what he has learned through his remaining years with his father. What shakes him, again, is not necessarily the homosexuality, but more so the zest for life in which Hal grabbed onto in his final years, and how even in such a brief amount of time, he was able to finally grab hold of a loving, meaningful life.
Two months later, Oliver meets Anna (Mélanie Laurent) at a party, and their connection is immediate and intoxicating. Anna’s life is busy, and Anna herself carries her own set of intimacy issues; in the past, Oliver might have simply let this connection fizzle. But now, he recognizes the value of precious things, and decides to pursue a relationship with her. And it’s frustrating, and messy, and at times deeply painful; neither has ever been so vulnerable with another partner, so inevitably their innermost traumas get prodded by being together. In the end, though, that’s what makes it worth keeping. He wouldn’t have recognized this, and cherished this, without the last four years with his father.
The Joy of Beginning
Perhaps if the film glossed over Hal’s pain and strictly focused on the “fun, watchable parts” of his coming-out experience, one might be able to call this film somewhat exploitative. If it was just a shallow story about death and living, one could call it that.
But that’s far what Beginners is. This film touches on something very profound about queerness and the human experience, which is that the process of becoming is something that requires a lot of bravery. This is even truer for those of us who haven’t had the luxury to figure it out in our own time, and who’ve had to hide who we are in order to survive. Historically, queer joy has been hard-won, which is partially why, I think, it is also so abundant.
Oliver did not take any of this for granted. He accepted his father unabashedly, learned as much as he could to help his father, and ultimately learned some valuable lessons himself as a result. The love that he witnessed his father exude taught him how to love fully and openly in return. They were both beginners in the process of becoming, and there is something to be said about the freedom of love and choice they both experienced in this process, late as it came to them.
In that vein, I would still consider Beginners a queer movie, because it tells a story that still deserves to be told: that of the older generation among us, and how their joy deserves to be honored in whatever capacity it has manifested. And, how that joy is something anyone and everyone can see the value in, as well as learn from. It is a joy that dares to become, and in a time when the process of becoming continues to be daunting, we should all celebrate the beauty, and bravery, of it.
(Featured Image: Focus Features)
