Beginners

IF YOU WERE feeling unkind, you could view Mike Mills’s latest film as an almost self-parodic adventure in liberal quirkiness. Just consider the plot. Late in life, a widower reveals to his son that he has always known himself to be gay.

In between constructing snarky cartoons and exchanging Nouvelle Vague non-sequiturs with a Frenchwoman – always to hand in such entertainments – the son reaches a comfortable understanding with the older man. Oh, and there’s a talking Jack Russell.

Happily, Mills, director of the similarly off-centre Thumbsucker, manages to make something quite delightful of this uneasy material.

It helps that he has cast the indomitable Christopher Plummer as Hal, the newly liberated retiree. An actor who has blossomed with the passing decades, the great Canadian offers a performance that – mournful regret sitting alongside newly hatched childlike enthusiasm – bolsters a piece that might otherwise have given in to limpness. Ewan McGregor is also pretty good as Oliver, the bemused son.

The picture begins with Oliver packing away debris after his father has died. We then flashback to the moment when, following his mother’s death, Hal explained that, though happy enough in his marriage, he never quite got on with heterosexuality.

Utilising witty montages and sly asides, the film offers a potted history of the gay experience in bourgeois America while allowing Oliver the space to work through that romance with a visiting European actor (Mélanie Laurent in an inevitable hat).

Hal grew up in an era where homosexuality was regarded as psychological illness, but he still manages to shake off any residual anxiety and embrace the contemporary gay lifestyle.

In one charming moment, coached by his son, he (literally, with pen and pad) notes that the entertaining repetitive disco he enjoys is called “house music”.

It all adds up to a beguiling combination of funky style and sincerely rendered emotional punch. Tears will be shed.