Mike Mills somehow makes the present day nostalgic through his directing in Beginners. With a plot revolving how the past has affected the present, Mills presents memory as something wondrous and solid and also constructed. As a graphic designer, Mills utilizes collection and collage to build the past and the memory of characters within the film. Simultaneously, the now is presented as ever-changing and instable, but based in the stably constructed past. Mike Mills evokes the familiarity of nostalgia and the discomfort of new territory through sound, camera movement, and portraiture to construct an entire world that lives simultaneously in a time gone and a time yet to be.
Beginners follows Oliver, an introverted graphic designer, in the wake of his father’s death. Though the audience receives the memories out of order, the story chronologically begins when Hal, Oliver’s father, comes out to Oliver as gay. Hal begins exploring his sexuality and the social life that comes with it: joining book clubs, hosting movie nights, going to clubs, and finding a reinvigorated love for life. Then Hal gets sick, and Oliver takes care of him while he battles cancer. Eventually Hal dies, and Oliver must move on with his life. He is very sad, everything he creates at work is sad, and then he meets Anna. Anna is an actress and the love interest in this story. Since Oliver had to grow up watching his parents’ loveless marriage, he has a hard time maintaining love. We the audience learn that Oliver was able to learn about love from his father in his last few years, and seeks that with Anna. At the end of the film, we are left at the beginning of their lives together.
The first time I watched this film, I noticed that there was a pattern of when the camera was stable versus when the camera was moving, even slightly. I thought this movement had something to do with Oliver’s insecurity and stability in his life. Then I thought it had to do with metaphorically being stuck vs. going somewhere. Then I realized it wasn’t either of those and also is both: when we are seeing a memory the camera is on sticks or moves on a dolly and when we are in the Now, the camera is handheld. Delineating time seems simpler than my first two impulses, but it’s not simpler. The shakiness in the present day is because of Oliver’s insecurity and stability and mobility: nothing is certain in the present. Memory is shot on sticks because it has happened, and there is no changing it. Combined with the portraits that I’ll cover later in this essay, it is very clear that Mills sees memory as a static concrete thing - even if it is constructed by the person remembering. By shooting everything in Oliver’s present day handheld, we experience the constant changes and shifts that the character does and the uncertainty of the future.
Mills utilizing sound and silence to create and reinforce nostalgia, to remind the audience of the effect the past has on the present. When we meet Anna, she has Laryngitis and cannot speak. So most of their communication is through action with a little written word. The scene in which Anna and Oliver meet, they are at a costume party. She writes him a few notes, they dance, then they leave the party together. Shortly after their meeting, we see them on silent escapades through city center and hotel. With rag music underscoring their actions and the lack of dialogue, the present moment becomes a nostalgic callback to silent film. Then, when we first meet Arthur, the dog, he too is silent...for he is a dog. But then the convention is set up that he will speak through subtitles - also as if in a silent movie. He becomes a clever device to access Oliver’s inner monologue.
One of the most unique and remarkable conventions in Beginners is the specific portraiture of characters through creation of filmic collage. Mills has discussed in interviews that he doesn’t consider himself to generate all the pieces, but rather to organize them. He collects and collages to tell the story. I’m focusing on the portraiture of the character Hal as an example, but these portraits are done throughout the movie of different characters in different ways. The first information we get about Hal in the opening (1:20-3:10) is through his objects. His empty house, his pill bottles, etc. He is absent from this portrait but the emptiness is still a portrait of Hal. Then, we get a literal picture of him and the first dialogue of the film: “This is for our friend, Hal Fields. Hal, we love you.” So we get an empty portrait of a man who was loved. Then, a few minutes later (4:25-6:30), we begin to see how Mills constructs memory: Oliver talks about the broader context of a time in which a person exists and how that context affects who the person is. This includes a lot about his dad from a time that Oliver himself never knew. So for the construction of memory of Hal’s life, Mills uses found pictures. Then when we get into a time Oliver does know but does not participate in firsthand, Mills gives us footage of Hal - but it’s posed as if for a photograph. All of these stills give a sense of who Hal was. But there is more to a person than their objects, or the groups they were a part of, so then Mills does one more portrait of Hal (1:36:38) comprised only of shots and moments we’ve seen already. Along with this portrait, we see again the very first image we saw in the film of Hal. All of these small moments that we have seen in context of larger scenes throughout the movie are placed over the audio of a personal ad Hal placed: a kind of self-portrait. In the final collage, we get the sense that these are the real portraits of Hal: the intangible, inexplicable fleeting moments that make a person who they are.
Through camera movement, sound, and portraits Mills builds a story that relies on discovering what makes a person who they are. Beginners is perched on the line between memory and reality, alluding to the importance of a person’s past and future in who they are in the present