Final Paper
Beginners

The movie Beginners, released in 2010, based on the experiences that Mike Mills, who wrote the script and directed the movie, went through after his mother died. The story builds around the main character, Oliver, who just one week ago had to bare with the death of his mother who had died due to a cancerous brain tumor. Now, one week after his mother has died, Oliver’s father sits across from him and tells Oliver that throughout the many years of his parent’s marriage, his father has secretly been gay. Oliver’s father, Hal, has been living in secrecy for the entirety of his life, because homosexuality was not socially accepted when he was younger and later his marriage prevented him from being free. Hal, now that he is unbound, tells Oliver “I don’t want to be just theoretically gay, I want to do something about it” (Beginners, 2010). Confronted with this Oliver reflects on his life growing up with two parents that never seemed to be the way he thought they should have.
Writer and director Mike Mills experienced precisely this, when his father, shortly after his mother died because of brain cancer in 1999, opened up to him about being gay throughout his entire life. At this point, Mills’ father was at the age of 75 years and had been married to his wife for 45 years. Five years later, his father died due to cancer of the lungs. Mills wanted to share this story with the world, because he was so baffled by the adventure that he had lived through, as well as the uplifting and humorous sides that go hand in hand with even such sad topics as death. “The concrete details of my father’s life, the real struggles, and all the real humor gave the film an authenticity that I hope will make it more powerful and more emotional for all kinds of people” (Mills, 02.2011, para. 2).

While writing the movie, Mills tried to make sense of things that did not appear to him right away, such as why his parents got married in the first place, if they knew that his father was gay. For this, Mills not only did research on the social and historical surroundings that his parents lived in, but he also lead internal conversations with his father. This step, he describes, helped him understand his parents’ and father’s actions more. Mills explains that he left the position of being the son, to become more of a peer or ally, to become someone that could support his father fully, instead of getting caught up on questions that would have just left him in uncertainty. This sense-making is an important part of dealing with the loss of someone that was close (Davis, Nolen-Hoeksema, & Larson, 1998).
The movie makes use of its clear differentiation of the settings, namely Oliver’s younger years as the child of a distanced marriage, his life around his aged father, who is struggling with cancer and exploring a new side of himself, and finally, Oliver’s relationship with Anna. This all can be summarized into the category of multi-strand narratives, which feature different narratives (Campora, 2009).
Mike Mills describes in a blog that was created to show some more personal parts and influences that helped build the movie another one of his influences. Mills mentions that one of his main influences is Woody Allen, especially his works between the years of 1977 and 1987, such as Annie Hall, Stardust Memories, and Manhattan. In Allen’s films the absurdity and necessity of love are often main themes, taking into account both the romantic and heart-warming side of love and relationships, but also the difficulties, bizarreness and (sometimes almost cynical) humor that it entails. These are schemes that are easily translatable into what can be taken from Beginners.
All of the stories of love and relationships throughout Beginners live off of the combination of regular problems and loveable comedy, which are relatable as they are inherent to most – if not all – relationships. Exemplary, the playfulness between Oliver and his mother, or between Oliver and Anna, shows the nice side of a relationship, the positive emotion and fun that are involved, the joy gained from seemingly unimportant little instances. Oliver’s mother involves him in games like the ‘You point, I drive’-game, which Oliver in turn takes on in his relationship with Anna. Then again, it also shows the unspoken difficulties and imperfections, as well as the subtle reflections of the internal dissatisfaction in the characters. Young Oliver noticing that something is not exactly right between his parents, for instance when his mother lets hints slip at her not being satisfied with her marriage, and Anna and Oliver noticing that their relationship is not working out the way that they had hoped for it, due to both of their personal issues, reflect exactly this.
Beginners incorporates various topics that are important to pay attention to when analyzing its context, like homosexuality, being Jewish in the time period post World War 2, a child’s struggle with its parents dysfunctional marriage, and problems resulting from insufficient relationships to one’s parents. The movie shows us how Oliver struggles with finding love and accepting it. As a result of having gone through various unfruitful relationships over the years and his parents’ dissatisfaction with their marriage, Oliver has difficulties with letting go of preexisting inhibitions that keep him from fully engaging in a serious relationship. Anna, who he meets at a party and falls in love with, and Andy, his father’s younger lover, add further dimensions to the storyline and help develop Oliver’s character throughout the movie.
The first topic that is addressed in the movie is homosexuality. Hal, Oliver’s father, grew up in a time when being gay was not publicly accepted in the United States. Homosexuality was commonly considered a mental illness and to be curable (Meyer, 2003). For the best part of his life, Hal lived in secrecy towards his surroundings and his son in regards to his sexuality. While homosexuality is becoming more and more of an accepted life-choice and the amount of people who come out of the closet instead of hiding is ever growing. However, the possibility described in the movie is one that is rarely discussed. A lot of discourse focuses on those who nowadays realize that they are gay and how they deal with it, but rarely is the option taken into consideration that there may be many people who have been secretly gay throughout their entire life, perhaps have a family, and now want to break free. Hal’s choice to no longer suppress this part of himself after his wife passes away, and to engage with the gay community is something that I can expect to happen more often, now that the perception of homosexuality is becoming increasingly positive. Beginners, therefore, manages to take a step into a direction that seems relatively unexplored.
In relations to this the movie discusses another tragedy; that of Oliver’s mother Georgia. Being part Jewish, she faced various difficulties during her life, as she was discriminated for her religious heritage, growing up during World War 2. Georgia, although she did not have to face active persecution through the Nazis, still had to deal with discrimination. Georgia was raised by parents that tried to hide their religious identity, hence she only learned about this when she was 13 years old. One of the things that she had to deal with back then was being asked by her swimming team to leave the team. During one scene of the movie Anna tells Oliver that, when she was in school in France, a girl told her that Jewish girls couldn’t be pretty. From this we can take that even years later, long after World War 2 has ended, there are still racist ideologies floating around in everyday life. Oliver, later in life, realizes that both of his parents knew about his father’s sexuality and his “father traded in his gay badge when [his] mother traded in her Jewish badge” (Beginners, 2010). The concepts of being married for reasons of social self-preservation, as well as Hal believing in being able to be cured from his ‘sickness’, are of broader importance as these cases occurred more frequently during those times. Oliver, growing up in this environment, struggles with the fear of failing at relationships, where he is convinced that his relationships will not work out to an extent that he ensures that they don’t. When he meets Anna, he decides to put himself on the line again, as he falls in love with her. Anna, however, also struggles with problems that are caused by her parents, more specifically her father. Both Anna and Oliver have the aforementioned difficulties with relationships, although they both struggle for different reasons. Anna, being an actress, travels a lot, lives in hotels in different cities and lacks a real home or secured foundation to build on. In the film she describes how it is both hard to remain and easy to let relationships fall apart if you are constantly on the go, to which Oliver replies “[y]ou can stay in the same place and still find ways to leave people” (Beginners, 2010). However, Oliver later draws lessons from the time he spent with his father in the years before his death to further his relationship with Anna, letting him see a benefit in his loss (Davis, Nolen-Hoeksema, & Larson, 1998). Anna, apart from her struggles with seeking intimacy and closeness while not wanting to give up her freedom and independence, also has to deal with issues caused by her father who is depressed and suicidal (Billings & Moos, 1983). He does not let her go, in the sense that he tells her she is the only one he can talk to about his depression and thereby making her carry the weight of dealing with this. Wherever Anna goes, her father keeps on interfering with her life, putting the pressure of keeping him alive on her.
If we take into account the difficulties that the relationship between Oliver and Anna faces and then compare it to the difficulties that Oliver’s parents had to deal with when they were younger, we can distinguish two types of societies that surround them. For Hal and Georgia, exemplified for the generation that they grew up in and the surrounding social norms, the problems were of an external nature. The socially rejected homosexuality and Jewish belief are both factors that limit their freedom on an external level. Anna and Oliver, contrarily, are living in a far more free and uninhibited world where they do not have to deal with external issues, but instead face their own internal problems and fears.
Oliver, who is an introverted and rather sullen person, finds an outlet for his emotions through his work as a graphic artist, drawing comics and doodles that express his feelings. Oliver borrows this characteristic directly from Mike Mills, who also has worked as a graphic artist. However, Oliver is not fulfilled by his work, because his actual ideas, his creative outburst that arise from his inner feelings are often shot down by clients. They prefer the mainstream art that have been done before and worked for others, as opposed to the innovative new ideas. One of Oliver’s projects is entitled ‘The Sads’ and bases on the name of a band that asks him to do their album cover artwork for him. “The Sads” is inspired by his father telling him about being gay when he was younger that “if you got caught by the Vice Squad you could lose everything” – following this, Oliver says “This is everything.” (Beginners, 2010) while portrait pictures, cut out of old print-ads, showing smiling faces are shown. His project combines several of these cutouts and can be understood as an analogy to the concept of ‘Americana’, the perfect happiness of Americans. Americana can be further defined as the memory of a perfect time, a golden age, in which the United States of America flourished, where everybody had the chance to work their way to the top. The optimum that can be reached in regards to life in Americana takes from the ideas of working to the top, building a home and a family, and living happily ever after. However, this perfect Americana-life also proclaims other guidelines. For instance, Americana focuses on white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), excluding other ethnic groups or sexualities (Porras & Matthews, 2008). ‘The Sads’ illustrates the plain truth of all of this cheerfulness, constant carelessness and happiness often being mere façade and lies.

Mike Mills’ Beginners is a movie that reflects, for one, various issues that people nowadays have to face while going through life, but also puts it in relation to where they originate from and how, even decades ago, our parents had to deal with their own problems, however different they may be. Based on the true-life experiences that Mike Mills faced, Beginners opens different chapters of history, as well as current societal issues for discussion, and makes them accessible to a broader public, who might have never taken these things into consideration. For me, the movie not only reflects on issues such as homosexuality, social exclusion by religious beliefs and dealing with your parents problems, but more so, it manages to create an understanding for what people are facing nowadays and where these things arise from. Even more so, Beginners manages to not leave us melancholic and overthrown by all the struggles portrayed, but instead succeeds in opening our eyes and leaving us satisfied with reality, which is not always picture perfect, but rather gains its greatness from this lack of perfection.
While Beginners might not have triggered the largest outrages or societal movements/followings, it does leave a certain legacy. Apart from the fact that a film like this contributes to the overall development of the concept of homosexuality, as well as the perception and acceptance of it, it might also affect people differently. Namely, a film like this, acknowledging the topic of homosexuality as a central and important issue, helps build society’s understanding that things like these are without a doubt acceptable and accepted. Perhaps, it could even lead to influencing closeted homosexuals find the courage to come out, seeing that not only within the movie it is received well, but also in an extension, the film itself got a positive feedback.
Unfortunately, Beginners is a movie that, in my opinion, is far less renown than it deserves. I base this on general observations in regards to who has seen the movie, as well as its general availability in stores and overall recognition in the media. Although Beginners does have a lot of elements that could be regarded as essential to a winning formula, so to speak, and might make it as a sub-culture’s cult film (Jancovich, 2002), it fell short from ever really making the break in terms of selling on the mainstream market. The brilliant acting through the well-known and wonderful cast (Christopher Plummer even winning the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor in a Supporting Roll’), the cleverly written dialogues that combine a certain melancholic sadness with bright and loveable humor, the combination of different love stories that differ from one another like black and white, the many inspiring ideas that are scattered throughout the movie, and the creativity that went into the directing and production by Mike Mills; all these are things that, in my opinion, contribute to the greatness of Beginners and give it the foundation to not only become a hit (McDonald, 2000), but also a classic.

References:

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Campora, M. (2009). Art cinema and New Hollywood: multiform narrative and sonic metalepsis in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 7(2), 119-131.

Davis, C. G., Nolen-Hoeksema, S., & Larson, J. (1998). Making sense of loss and benefiting from the experience: two construals of meaning. Journal of personality and social psychology, 75(2), 561.

Downey, G., & Coyne, J. C. (1990). Children of depressed parents: an integrative review. Psychological bulletin, 108(1), 50.

Jancovich, M. (2002). Cult fictions: cult movies, subcultural capital and the production of cultural distinctions. Cultural Studies, 16(2), 306-322.

McDonald, P. (2000). The star system: Hollywood's production of popular identities (Vol. 2). Wallflower Press.

Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations: conceptual issues and research evidence.
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Mills, M. (2011, February). Beginners: Director’s Statement. Retrieved from http://www.focusfeatures.com/article/beginners_director___s_statement ?film=beginners

Mills, M. (Writer & Director). 2010. Beginners [Film]. United States: Olympus
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Porras, D., & Matthews, R. (2008). Language development among immigrant students from the perspectives of two different assimilated instructors. Community College Journal of Research and Practice, 33(1), 25-35.

Sutherland, A. J. (2012). Performance Issues: Enacted Age/Essential Gender in
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