Dir. Mike Mills, USA, 2010, Dur 105 mins
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Melanie Laurent, Christopher Plummer
Review by Carol Allen
The fact that writer/director Mill’s film is inspired by the story of his own father and Mill’s own feelings, when coming to terms with his death, may partly at least account for the sense of both originality and truth in this really superb comedy/drama about love, life and relationships. But the film is by no means limited by its autobiographical origins. It has a unique life of its own, which leaps off the screen.
Oliver (McGregor) is still mourning the death of his father Hal (Plummer), when he meets and falls in love with Anna (Laurent), a French actress working in LA. Oliver is a man who has problems with relationships. As a child he always knew there was something not quite right about his parents’ marriage. Then, when his mother died, his father at the age of 75 revealed that he had always been gay, though had never acted on his true sexuality, and now wanted to live and behave as the man he really was. Oliver sees his father not only come out of the closet but experience life and love with a zest and energy he never had before. Even when a few short years later Hal is diagnosed with the cancer that is to kill him, that love of life never leaves him and Oliver loves him all the more.
Doesn’t sound like the stuff of humour, does it? But far from being a heavy handed, self indulgent trauma fest, Mills’s film celebrates the joy and comedy of life, as it tells the twin stories of Oliver and Hal. It has a complicated but always clear structure, moving between Oliver and Anna in the present and the father and son in the past, using clever and witty montages to illustrate the social climate which created the characters’ lives, as in the ideal of heterosexual marriage promoted through advertising and movies in the 50s, when Hal married and decided to deny his true self, and giving Oliver’s feelings a visual incarnation in the drawings he creates as a graphic artist illustrating the history of sadness.
The film is beautifully written and acted. McGregor gives one of his best ever performances as the conflicted but immensely likeable and self aware Oliver. Laurent is delightful as Anna, who has her own parental issues to deal with, and Plummer totally mesmerising as Hal, discovering the strange and wonderful world of being a senior gay in the twenty first century. There’s also good support from an almost unrecognisable Goran Visnjic as Hal’s lover, a man who can love more than one man at once – one of the facts about being gay that Hal has to wryly come to terms with – and from Mary Page Keller as Oliver’s frustrated and characterful mother, seen in flashback with her young son. The film also features the most touching and amusing man and dog relationship possibly ever seen in a movie, being that between Oliver and his late father’s Jack Russell Arthur, who becomes Oliver’s confidant in the wry conversations with subtitles (for the dog) that they share.
This is a genuine laughter and tears movie, totally unflashy and without a trace of sentimentality. It’s unusual, funny, moving and above all believable – one of the best films we’re likely to see in 2011.
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