Beginners (dir. Mike Mills)
This movie is very beautiful, funny, and sad. It has a dog who talks in subtitles. The first scene that made me cry was when the dog said, “tell her the darkness is about to drown us unless something drastic happens right now.” That is one of those lines that makes me ache with jealousy and admiration for the writer, and it is timed so perfectly in the film, with such faithfulness to how we experience grief. Several subsequent lines made me cry, even ones said out loud by human actors. Ewan McGregor is wonderful. Christopher Plummer is wonderful. Melanie Laurent is wonderful. Cosmo the Dog, who shares a name with a certain llama I know, is wonderful. I wish somebody had told me to see this sooner, I wish I had seen it in the theater, but really I think I watched it at the perfect time, when I am living in relative solitude, when I have gone an entire day without speaking to anyone but my dogs. Beginners is very personal and specific; that level of detail cracks open a world of relateable experience, hence all the crying. This a perfect short story (life story) of a film.
