As this bug continues, I’m still sofa-bound and forced to watch all the films I’ve had taped for millennia (tiny violins play). Today’s: Beginners. I loved it so much more than I thought I would (CAVEAT: I still think Vanilla Sky is an excellent film and EVERYONE ELSE IS WRONG), considering I usually find Ew-Mac pretty much unwatchable, but he’s good, Melanie Laurent manages to avoid MPDG, and Christopher Plummer (who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this role) is just fantastic. Achingly so.
Was it the right film for me to watch today? Maybe not. This is Ewan MacGregor’s character (Oliver Fields) with his father in the kitchen at a party, shortly after the father (Plummer, as Hal Fields) has been told he’s terminal.
OF in VO: He started telling everyone he was getting better.
OF: Why are you telling them you’re turning the corner?
HF: Oh, well…
OF: You have *stage 4* cancer.
HF: [sighs] It’s not as bad as it sounds.
OF: Pop. There is no stage 5.
HF: [chuckles] That’s not what it means!
OF: Well then what does it mean?
HF: It just means that it’s been through three other stages.
Yup. We well know that game. And later on, when Plummer is completely discharged from hospital care, referred instead to hospice care - we had that treat the other day. The final goodbye from the oncologist we liked so much. The hospital bed brought in. The rounds of medicine lined up by my mother in pill boxes ordered specially.
I know Hollywood illnesses are nothing to base a life on, but so much here echoes. But it was the stuff which doesn’t echo which makes me the most sad. Oliver Fields says of his father, ‘For the first time, I saw him really in love.’ Hal Fields’s final years, after he finally comes out in his seventies, are filled with activism, passion, singing, movie nights, parties, food, and love. Now, I’m not saying someone with three types of cancer plus a galloping case of PSP has any responsibility to show us what a whale of a time he’s having, but my god. If you don’t count contentment with sitting in an armchair reading the Daily Mail, I don’t remember the last time I ever thought my father was happy.