Chris Barsanti has been a Filmcritic reviewer since 2002. So there.Sadness is layered on top of sadness in Mike Mills's seriocomic account of a determinedly gloomy young man's coming to terms with the death of his recently-out-of-the-closet father. It comes incrementally at first, parsed by a stuttering narrative that can't seem to decide what the film is actually about, but by the end is washing over you in choking waves. There is little movement here, rather a lot more running in circles, much like the admittedly adorable Jack Russell, Arthur, who is able to speak to the mourning protagonist in subtitles. Were it not for a trio of magnificently calibrated performances, the whole thing would be less than unbearable. Ewan McGregor plays Oliver, the thirtysomething moper-in-chief. He narrates in a scratchy voice that sounds like it hasn't been used for a while, creating a story by listing events. Among those events are the death of his mother, his 75-year-old father Hal's (Christopher Plummer) subsequent revelation that he was gay, and Hal's death from cancer after just a few short years of being gloriously out and proud. This is all related in a tone of exhaustion, as though its user is well beyond used-up but can still appreciate the deadpan comedy of some of it -- particularly Hal's much-younger and exceedingly clueless sort-of boyfriend Andy (Goran Visnjic).
The end of Oliver and Hal's relationship is relayed in flashback, Oliver moving like a ghost through Hal's gregarious, late-flaring, and friend-filled life. Interleaved between these beautifully played moments, which always skirt but never quite succumb to mawkishness, is the beginning of Oliver's relationship with an intriguing romantic prospect. Anna (Mélanie Laurent) is a French-born actress just passing through town who gets to know Oliver in a meet-odd at a costume party. With his gloom and her near-silence (she's suffering from laryngitis at first), they have to create sparks with little more than immediate chemistry. This works for a time, as the film follows these two damaged people as they try to navigate each other's and their own rocky psyches.
For all the death and psychotherapeutic gamesmanship going on, this film is a comedy, and an often quite funny one at that. Plummer jazzes each of his scenes with an engagingly soulful playfulness, while McGregor subtly takes the background as the cloud that refuses to allow the sun to shine through. His narration is just self-aware enough to be funny: "Our good fortune allowed us to feel the sadness our parents never had time for." He's an artist, of course (the protagonists in films like this never seem to work at a burger joint or in telemarketing), creating look pieces like a cartoon "History of Sadness" that his clients have no interest in.
It's all fireworks and muted sparkle, unfortunately, with little to say about the nature of what we are witnessing. Anna and Hal's characters are well-lit in terms of their backgrounds, but Oliver remains a mystery. The sudden death of his two parents certainly gives him cause for depression, but there's a strong sense that this was how he always was. With the oh-so-carefully chosen indie-rock and blues soundtrack and pseudo-mumblecore cinematography, there's an air of something almost insufferably twee about the film. Again, Laurent, Plummer, and McGregor bring so much life even to their stunted characters that it almost completely blows through Mills's sometimes limiting parameters of muffled sourpuss posing (the same sort of thing that essentially ruined the remarkably self-indulgent Thumbsucker).
There's a lot of life here amidst the death, with characters wincingly and perpetually on the verge of something they can't quite get a hold of. They receive no good answers to much of anything, and it makes for a frustrating story. But that's probably as it should be; nobody said love was easy.
