Beginners - review

What, indeed, would Father do with his new freedom at that late stage?

Fortunately, in Mike Mills's whimsical but charming film, the son (Ewan McGregor) loves the father (Christopher Plummer) and supports him. And Father manages to find a nice boyfriend (Goran Visnjic) to share the remainder of his life.

Unfortunately, Father discovers he has terminal cancer, so things get darker by the day, but he makes the most of his time left, surrounded by people who love him. It's the son who has more trouble with his relationships, teaming up with a strange and neurotic woman (Mélanie Laurent).

He feels the only one who really loves him, apart from Dad, is his dog, who barks until he is allowed to join his master on a date, in a splendid running joke.

If you think this sounds horrendously sentimental and one to miss, think again. Because Plummer, a fine performer who often finds himself in movies such as The Sound of Music where proper acting is superfluous, is marvellous as the old man who loved his wife but desired men all his life.

This richly sympathetic but never overblown performance inspires McGregor towards one of his best characterisations on screen. And the Jack Russell deserves an Oscar nomination for best support.

Mills made the interesting Thumbsucker and here again invests a small, not particularly ambitious dramatic structure with a special feeling for ordinary middle-class people in extraordinary situations.

Sometimes confusingly, it goes backwards and forwards in time, so you see the son as a young boy coping manfully with his eccentric mother, who may or may not have guessed that her husband is gay. It ends in 2003 at a time when to come out was not such a terrible thing, unless you have kept quiet about it until you are of pensionable age.

It's one of those movies I can't be sure you'll be tempted by, but I'm certain that if you are, you'll like it very much.

Beginners
Cert: 15