A new film, Beginners (opens
Friday), puts a vivid and very odd twist to the traditional parent child coming
out story. A couple of viewings and a chat with its creator, Mike Mills, caused
me to reflect back on my own story, observing the power movies have to
reinforce lessons that real life can leave truly murky and unsatisfying.
My dad was dead before I came out
even to myself and as for my mom I didn’t so much come out to her as merely
skip town. When she finally made it to Texas as a ward of my sister I took it
upon myself to show her queer Dallas: a Meg Christian concert, movie nights at
my duplex with my gay support group and finally a raucous kind of art happening
that ended with great sex with my aspiring painter, soon to be ex boyfriend,
while mom snoozed in the next room.
In his new film Beginners Mike
Mills ups the stakes for an equally idiosyncratic inter-generational coming out
party by flipping the premise, in this case detailing the eruption of gay
consciousness that exploded from his retired museum director dad when his wife
of forty-five years died. In my grumpy family coming out didn’t produce some
miracle of understanding, spiritual epiphanies or emotional catharsis. They
weren’t so much homophobic as simply resentful that some grand new drama had
been introduced into our ongoing domestic battlefield that wasn’t about them.
With Beginners Mills employs
the wit, precision for telling complicated personal stories with a great acting
ensemble and, yes, the peculiar straight boy sensitivity to queer issues he
displayed with his debut feature, 2005’s Thumbsucker, to embed us inside
an arid marriage of convenience seen from the point of view of a scared little
boy who grows up to be a relationship phobic adult man.
In slapdash flashbacks we see the
boy becoming substitute partner for his mood-swinging mom, who doesn’t get
enough from her art museum curator deeply closeted husband. In the film’s
present tense, dad (a wonderful Christopher Plummer) bursts forth and embraces
gay life with gusto, including time sharing a much younger boyfriend. Ewan
McGregor as the grown son fusses and frets as dad shrugs off stage four cancer.
“There’s no stage five.”
A brilliant transition device has
Oliver commiserating with his dad’s now orphaned Jack Russell terrier, Cosmo,
who has scene stealing sad eyes and New Yorker cartoon caption witty subtitled
rejoinders like, “I have a vocabulary of up to 150 words but I don’t talk.”
The Anna and Oliver part of the
movie flounders a bit in a sea of heartfelt but emotionally dodgy mumblecore,
where the characters consume eons of screen time without exactly advancing
towards any clearly defined goals.
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My introduction to Mills’ real life
queer family diorama came about accidentally when a question I asked in our
2005 chat about Thumbsucker’s boy hero’s (Lou Taylor Pucci) relationship
to his possibly closeted high school debate coach (an unusually vulnerable
Vince Vaughn) produced an totally unexpected mini-bio of his then recently
demised gay dad. “My dad came out – my parents were married for 45 years. They
are the World War II-era generation. He was gay in a world where that just was
a very hostile place, and the limited place, and the limited life you could
have as a gay person really freaked him out. He and my mom were friends since
high school, and they really did love each other on some level, and tried to
work it out, and god knows exactly what he did for 45 years. He was with her
and not with other people. When he came out, he was 75-years-old, and he came
out full guns, not just intellectually. He really wanted to be gay in every way
and have a relationship. It was a very beautiful, sad, crazy part of all our
lives. And it’s definitely a part of my life, because I live with that father
figure who definitely was an odd father figure, a closeted gay man.
“In many points of my life it would
have been advantageous to be gay, going to art school, being in the New York
art scene, But I never really felt that was what I was. At the same time, I can
often identify with gay guys more than straight gays as far as sensibility,
interests and friendships with women.”
During a recent joint news conference
with his star, Ewan McGregor, Mike Mills expanded on the implications that his
dad’s coming out had on his family, including Mill’s own older sisters whose
stories are left out of the movie.
“I have two sisters, who aren’t in
the story, which gives you an idea of how much it is fiction, and when I turned
eighteen, my sister said, ‘You know pop’s gay,’ – or key word: was gay – I did
not know this! Because my dad, born in 1925, wore a suit, voted for Reagan,
disciplinarian in the family, art historian, smart dude – doesn’t seem like he
ever had sex, first of all, with anybody and secondly that he wasn’t gay. He
was an art historian, did buy my mom a lot of clothes, did wear a little cravat
and all the little clichés you could associate with that. But he felt more like
a Victorian turn of the century person than anything else.
In the end – his coming out was
amazing for me. I loved my dad so much, he was so awesome and so much more
engaged with me and taught me so much more about my ‘straightness’ than my
‘straight’ dad did. I really mean we talked about sex, like details of sex and
what you can hope for in a relationship in a way that we never did when he was
straight. Just imagine: my mom has just died and my second parent seems like
he’s about to die and all of sudden he’s like forty, he’s got a trainer, he’s
wearing all black, he’s really alive and there’s like this pool of guys who are
so sweet to him and then when he did get sick they were the first ones at the
hospital – so everything about his gayness I really cherish.”