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<\/a>By Jeffrey Overstreet<\/p>\nDuring a lecture last March [2011], I spoke fondly of a friend whom I had recently lost to cancer. Halfway through the anecdote, I suddenly recognized his wife, the mother of his two young children, in the audience, listening in rapt attention. She was far from home, a surprise visitor. I almost choked. And I suddenly began weighing my words with much greater care. Had I represented her husband well?<\/p>\n
Loss makes artists out of all of us. We become storytellers, portrait painters, recreating the departed.<\/p>\n
During grief\u2019s early days, we break heavy silences to recall the scenes we want to remember. For strangers, we\u2019ll sketch an outline, fill in some details. We simplify, generalize, organize.<\/p>\n
We consider questions that will never be answered, dreams never realized. And we might carefully acknowledge their rougher edges, the ways they tested our patience\u2014but we\u2019ll wince if anyone blurts out words of criticism or judgment.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a challenge, to keep someone\u2019s memory alive with honesty and honor. It\u2019s a responsibility, a delicate art.<\/p>\n
This month [June 2011], director Mike Mills brings vivid memories of his father and mother to the big screen in\u00a0Beginners<\/em>. Having lost one and then the other to cancer in quick succession, he shares a storm of stories, revelations, questions, and emotions in a feature-length film.<\/p>\n After his mother passed, Mills\u2019 father surprised him by confessing that he had spent forty-five years of marriage concealing and restraining his homosexuality. The man had chosen marriage and fatherhood to escape the prevalent prejudice of the 1950s. But as a widower, the seventy-five-year-old man enthusiastically refashioned his life, embraced gay culture, and spent five years pursuing new love, ignoring cancer\u2019s advance.<\/p>\n \u201cFor me a lot of grief is like running in the dark in a forest,\u201d says Mills, \u201csprinting forward, trying to get to something. I hope that\u2019s what we captured in the movie, this mad grab for life.\u201d<\/p>\n The result might have been called\u00a0Beginnings<\/em>. With the dawning of a new perspective, Mills revisits the strange silences of his childhood, and shows how his father\u2019s revelation took their relationship back to \u201cstart.\u201d Seeing the old man\u2019s liberation from fear and constraint, even in the shadow of cancer, he learned lessons about his own fears.<\/p>\n But this isn\u2019t a memoir. Fictionalizing his experience, Mills invites his extraordinary cast to find their way toward moments that ring true, rather than requiring them to act out the specifics of his memories.<\/p>\n The film follows Oliver (Ewan McGregor in one of his finest performances), a graphic artist who turns his sadness into art. In shock over his father\u2019s death, he\u2019s fallen into a prolific period of melancholy drawings. As he strikes up a stormy new romance with a troubled French actress named Anna (the stunning, soft-spoken Melanie Laurent), he begins to put his life story into words.<\/p>\n In flashbacks, we share Oliver\u2019s memories of his mother\u2019s moods, her smoking, her loneliness. We feel his confusion at his father\u2019s revelation. And we watch him struggle to care for an ailing man who refuses to take his sickness seriously. Hal\u2014played with vigor, warmth, and humor by the great Christopher Plummer\u2014prefers to charge forward, giddy about new possibilities.<\/p>\n What does love look like in this situation? And what does Hal\u2019s last chapter mean for Oliver, who has never dared to take on the burdens of a serious, lasting relationship?<\/p>\n Beginners\u00a0<\/em>is a very persuasive film, largely due to nuanced performances\u2014and that includes the charming Jack Russell terrier who plays Arthur, Oliver\u2019s four-legged grief counselor (via subtitles). Unlikely as it sounds, Mills weaves all of these emotional storylines together\u2014and anthropomorphizes a canine\u2014without stumbling into sentimentality or emotional manipulation.<\/p>\n It feels true, lived-in, every single moment.<\/p>\n When I met Mills and McGregor at the Seattle International Film Festival, Mills said that he\u2019d given his actors a challenge. \u201cI remember saying, \u2018Help me not make this a narcissistic, self-pitying, sentimental memoir.\u2019 I love films that are naturalistic and organic, when you feel the truth of life is in there somewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe shot two films,\u201d McGregor explained. \u201cWe shot the father and son film in its entirety and then we stopped, rehearsed, and shot the second film [about Oliver and Anna]. So, when I looked back on moments with my father, in the story with Anna, I was literally able to remember those moments, because we\u2019d shot them already.\u201d<\/p>\n While I grew up with parents who loved one another passionately (and still do), and while I\u2019ve never dealt with revelations as unexpected as Hal\u2019s, I was deeply moved by these characters. The authenticity\u2014the particularity of details, the complex personalities and relationships, the moments of nuanced human emotion\u2014drew me deeply into this story.<\/p>\n I\u2019m sure that some will react hastily, their differing moral and political sensibilities offended. But I think that\u2019s inappropriate.<\/p>\n While Mills does express his grievances about societal prejudice, this story is about something much bigger than sexual orientation. He\u2019s hosting a memorial service for his parents, illustrating the struggles and convictions that gave a shape to their lives.<\/p>\n While I find some of the characters\u2019 behaviors to be misguided at best, as I watch them searching for warmth in a cold world, I relate to their longings, and I treasure what blessings I\u2019ve known even more.<\/p>\n I hope audiences open themselves to Mills\u2019 experiences and unresolved questions. Which was more honorable\u2014Hal\u2019s sacrificial life of fidelity, family, and suffering, or his last-act lunge for happiness, which was more self-centered and more honest? \u201cMy real dad\u2026is his story a sad story?\u201d Mills asks. \u201cWhat was his commitment to my mom? Was it all self-sacrifice? How much did he really love her? It\u2019s so ambiguous. One day I can feel one thing, one day I can feel another.\u201d<\/p>\n If we hope to love our neighbors, we must listen attentively to their stories\u2014however unfamiliar or discomforting they might be. We might even find a certain kinship with Oliver and Hal, and learn something from this honest testimony.<\/p>\n The movie might have closed with an Over the Rhine song: \u201cWe\u2019re all still beginners \/ we\u2019re all late bloomers \/ when it comes to love.\u201d<\/p>\n Originally published in\u00a0<\/em>Good Letters\u00a0on June 15, 2011.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Jeffrey Overstreet<\/strong>\u00a0has been recognized for his writing on cinema in\u00a0The New Yorker, Time, The Seattle Times,<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Image,<\/em>\u00a0and spent an award-winning decade as film reviewer for\u00a0Christianity Today<\/em>. Overstreet writes fiction, memoir, reviews, and arts journalism. He is an international public speaker and teacher of creative writing, film studies, and cultural engagement for people of faith, including a term as Writer-in-Residence at Covenant College in Georgia. Random House\u2019s WaterBrook Press has published four of his\u00a0novels including\u00a0Auralia\u2019s Colors<\/em>.\u00a0Through a Screen Darkly,\u00a0<\/em>his\u00a0\u201cmemoir of dangerous moviegoing\u201d is available from Baker Books. He lives in Seattle with his wife, the poet\u00a0Anne M. Doe Overstreet<\/a>, and serves as contributing editor to\u00a0Response\u00a0<\/em>magazine at Seattle Pacific University (SPU), where he works as a Communications Specialist.\u00a0 He is\u00a0currently writing two novels, a book about film, and is enrolled in SPU\u2019s MFA in Creative Writing program. He blogs at\u00a0Looking Closer<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Jeffrey Overstreet During a lecture last March [2011], I spoke fondly of a friend whom I had recently lost to cancer. Halfway through the anecdote, I suddenly recognized his wife, the mother of his two young children, in the audience, listening in rapt attention. She was far from home, a surprise visitor. I almost […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1051,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[363,50],"tags":[1853,894,66,68,3565,389,1854],"class_list":["post-8606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guest-contributor","category-relationships","tag-beginners","tag-creation","tag-death","tag-healing","tag-jeffrey-overstreet","tag-loss","tag-rebirth"],"yoast_head":"\n