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In a summer loaded with sequels and adaptations, massive special effects and lowbrow humor, is there room for a quietly beautiful original romance?
Yes, there is, and writer-director Mike Mills' "Beginners" — opening in Salt Lake City on June 24 — may be the kind of counterprogramming a loud, busy summer needs most.
"Beginners" follows the emotional plight of Oliver (Ewan McGregor), both in the present (the present being 2003) and the recent past.
In the present, Oliver is falling for Anna (Melanie Laurent), a French-born actress who lives her life in hotel rooms. But Oliver is also looking back on the recent death of his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer). Five years earlier, after the death of Oliver's mother, his father announced that he was gay and lived a happy, fulfilling life out of the closet in his final years.
If that sounds like an offbeat premise, Mills will tell you that it's based on real life: his own.
"It's based a lot on my dad, my real dad," Mills said in a phone interview. Mills' father, like Hal, was born in 1925, married in 1955 and came out after Mills' mother died.
His dad's announcement "was quite a revolution for me," Mills said. "The week before he came out, I was holding his arm as he walked. … When he came out, he became alive and more emotionally vivid. Much more uncontained and complicated and great."
But the movie version is definitely fiction, Mills stressed. "I never think my dad is Christopher Plummer," he said.
While editing the film, watching Plummer on screen with the sound off, Mills said "it was so strange. He's so great as Hal. He's based on my dad, but he's not my dad. I felt my dad on my right side, watching it with me."
In casting "Beginners," Mills knew he wanted to cast McGregor, but wasn't sure the actor would be familiar enough with Mills' work — he previously had directed "Thumbsucker," an adaptation of a Walter Kirn novel that played at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.
" 'Thumbsucker' didn't catapult me into a place where I think I'm going to land Ewan McGregor," Mills said. "But I got the script to him, and he just liked it. It was quite easy from that point on."
Mills persuaded Laurent, a rising star after her role in "Inglourious Basterds," to audition — and she responded by making her own audition tape. "All these little shots, even shots without her," Mills recalled. "It's a pretty good audition tape for an actress, but an amazing tape for a director."
Oliver's relationship with Anna is different from Mills' real romantic life, he said. In 2010, not long after his father's death, Mills married the filmmaker and performance artist Miranda July (whose first movie, "Me and You and Everyone We Know," debuted at Sundance the same year as "Thumbsucker").
Mills and July don't talk about their relationship to the press, he said, but noted that "we inspire each other a ton."
They don't go over each other's movie scripts, though. "We don't sit around and talk shop all the time," Mills said. "We're the person outside our writing and directing lives for each other."
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