As the film opens, Oliver (Ewan McGregor) tells us that his mother died five years ago and that his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer) has just passed away from cancer. Hal had just came out as gay after living as a straight married man since the 1950s; in his final years, he had a lover, Andy (Goran Visnjic) and began to open up to his son in ways that he had never done in the past.
The story is told simultaneously in the present and flashbacks at the past, sometimes at Oliver's childhood interacting with his off-beat mother and sometimes looking at the last years of his father'a life, but always from Oliver's point of view. He's a sad guy; now in his 40s, he is an artist living and working in LA and never totally connecting to anyone (including his friends). There is a suggestion from them that he used to be more "into it all," but he's gotten sadder and more quiet, either because of his father's death or exacerbated by that.
At any rate, he goes to a party with them where he meets Anna (Melanie Laurent) a French actress living in an LA hotel for some short period of time. The two immediately connect, probably they each see a similar dourness in the other, and they try to make it work together despite their individual distrust of humanity and Oliver's specific pain from losing his father, who had become a close friend in recent years.
I think that a well-crafted montage is one of the best and most interesting devices a director can use, and Mills employs them here wonderfully and rather unlike anything else I've ever seen. There is a refrain and a structure they all come back to. In a monotone voice-over we hear Oliver say, for instance "I was born in 1963. This is the President in 1963; this is what nature looked like; this is the sun; the stars." As we hear these things, we see advertising or publicity stills of the things being described. Yes, it's certainly a bit precious, but it's effective. This is how Oliver sees the world and this gets us into his literal frame of reference. He is not a very elaborate emotional person, rather he sees things in a binary way: happy/sad, pain/pleasure, good/bad, comfort/discomfort. These montages lead us into this understanding.
To say they are reminiscent of Hollis Frampton's seminal art film, (nostalgia), is an understatement, and perhaps strikingly naive. The disembodied voice feels close and uncomfortably clinical at the same time; the idea of images summing up emotions and acting as stand-ins for whole stories. Really what the connection comes down to is exactly the title, nostalgia - and more specifically sadness over things long ago (even things you didn't experience yourself).
As the film goes along, Oliver seems to be working on an art project about sadness, hand-drawn pictures that have some political message and some personal connection (they're about his father's suppression of his sexuality). Clearly Mills isn't subtle with his themes.
Back with Anna, they both have issues with their parents (she has an ongoing discussion with her father he wants to kill himself for reasons we never find out). They connect because they're both moving at the same slow pace experiencing everything, stopping to smell the roses, as it were. Oliver is clearly afraid of commitment, and ambivalent about "taking the next step" with her, for fear their relationship will evaporate (because things move toward nothingness, of course).
The connection they mutually feel is frightening to Oliver, who has connected to several people over the years. First we see his unconventional mother (who is a riot, played by Mary Page Keller), who seems to interact with the 10-year-old Oliver as if she is a 10-year-old. She does a silly dance in an art gallery, she has a game where she shoots him with her fingers as a gun and critiques his death-fall. It's clear that as a kid, he connected more to his mother. After she died, he clearly connected to his father and appreciated his joie de vivre and recognized his life-long struggles. After his father's death, he connects to his father's dog, Arthur, who doesn't speak, though we do see his glances subtitled several times (this is wonderful and very reminiscent of Miranda July's joyful eccentricity).
Oliver is worried that he might not be in an emotional position, at this moment, to properly give himself to Anna, and he wants to cut off the relationship before they get in too deep. Clearly this is a self-fulfilling action, as pushing her away for no good reason...well, it pushes her away. We feel bad for her, but also bad for him. He knows not what he does.
All four lead actors here are non-Americans (and then the fifth is a dog) and only Laurent is playing a foreigner. I found McGregor's American accent difficult throughout, as much as I tried to ignore and just chalk it off to a silly LA affectation. Really, Plummer, Visnjic and McGregor all struggle with their accents, though they all give very nice heart-felt performances. I guess Laurent's performance feels the most honest (possibly because she's playing a French woman who speaks with a French accent), because she doesn't seem to be reaching as far for the emotional connections to Anna's actions. (I'm very upset that I'm not dating Melanie. She's beautiful and talented... and Jewish... .)
Perhaps Mills relies too much on his montages. I think they would have been even more effective than they are if there had only been three or four of them rather than the six or seven we see. He's certainly a bit too blunt about the theme of sadness. Clearly the actors' accents are distracting too, but Mills gets great performances out of them all. He also uses technical stuff, like a wonderful, sad piano score by Roger Neil, Dave Palmer and Brian Reitzell to convey the darkness of the film, despite it's very funny writing. This is a movie that I expected to hate for being too sweet and too on-the-nose about child-parent emotions. It's much better than that and is a very nice work.
Stars: 3 of 4
As a rule, any film that cuts to an animal for a reaction shot is trouble (except for Asta in the Thin Man movies -- every rule has its exception). This movie has a "talking" dog that is unbearably precious and indicative of the film's mawkish sentimentality. I would have predicted you would despise it so I assume you really really found the female lead attractive. Otherwise, I'm at a loss here.
ReplyDelete