Beginners:

By Chris Tookey

Last updated at 1:40 AM on 22nd July 2011

Beginners (15)                                                                      

Verdict: Too cute by three-quarters

Rating:

Writer-director Mike Mills made a likeable cult comedy in Thumbsucker (2005).

His second venture, Beginners, is a backward step: decently acted but so uneventful and underpowered that it will stretch the patience of mainstream audiences.

It’s almost worth watching for a modestly charming performance by Ewan McGregor as a youngish man perplexed but sympathetic when his father (Christopher Plummer, equally impressive) comes out as gay at the age of 75.

Beginners: Ewan McGregor with Christopher Plummer, who plays his father, who reveals his homosexuality on his 75th birthday

But Mills doesn’t delve deep into character, and his movie takes such care to be non-judgmental that it strays into preciousness.

Plummer’s gayness manifests itself in a liking for colourful cravats and a forced joviality around other homosexuals.

You’d never guess that sexual impulses are involved; in this movie, it’s a deliciously quirky lifestyle choice, roughly equivalent to taking up bowling in silk pyjamas.

Good start but hard to follow is the verdict on Beginners

The film is even less daring as a gut-wrenchingly twee romance develops between McGregor’s sadness-obsessed cartoonist and a depressingly personality-free French actress (Melanie Laurent).

As that relationship fizzles, so does the movie as a whole. It turns into a bland, self-pitying bore — coy and creepily self-absorbed.

I can imagine this finding an appreciative fringe audience at the Sundance Film Festival, where being non-judgmental and liberal has taken the place of religious belief, but as a commercial prospect its prospects are — let’s try to be polite and non-judgmental about this — extremely limited.

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