The Thousands

This gently bittersweet film made me cry, but not for the quirky affair between American illustrator Oliver (Ewan McGregor) and French actress Anna (Mélanie Laurent), which includes a wordless meet-cute via notepad, roller-skating through an arcade and a Jack Russell who talks in subtitles. Their antics and angst feel self-indulgent compared to the dignity and joie de vivre of Oliver’s retired art-historian father Hal (a wonderful Christopher Plummer) in his final five years.

Mills presents this closely autobiographical story like a designer’s visual diary – an assemblage of archival imagery, marker sketches and observational vignettes set to a Woody Allen-like jazz soundtrack. Oliver recalls his witty, imaginative but unhappy mother Georgia (Mary Page Keller), and contrasts his tentative, self-sabotaging romantic behaviour with his dad’s fearless embrace of life with a younger boyfriend, Andy (Goran Visnjic), after Georgia’s death.

Beginners is wonderfully perceptive and compassionate about social forces that constrain people’s authentic selves, including anti-Semitism, homophobia and public propriety. In one immensely affecting scene, Oliver remembers that, when curating an exhibition of toys, Hal had quoted The Velveteen Rabbit (which also never fails to make me cry): “…once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”