First Hit: A wonderfully insightful film about growing into love.
Oliver (played by Ewan McGregor), after losing his mom, four years earlier, is now picking up the pieces of his life because his dad, Hal, has just died.
He’s had four significant relationships in his life where he insured they would not succeed by sabotaging them. Shortly after his mother Georgia (played by Mary Page Keller) died, his father, Hal (played by Christopher Plummer) announces that he is gay and is going to live a gay life. Hal also learns that he is dying of cancer.
The film effectively flashes back to Oliver’s young years sharing the sadness and disappointment both his mom and he experienced in their family. Georgia knew Hal was gay when she married him and always felt she could change him. Although he never had an affair while married, their marriage was filled with disappointment for Georgia.
Therefore, it was also disappointing for Oliver because besides the sadness in the family as a whole, his father was absent by working long hours as a museum curator. The film flashes also to Hal’s gay life including the younger man he meets and loves. Hal begins to love again the way he felt he should have always loved. One evening Oliver’s friends take him to a costume party where he goes as Sigmund Freud.
There he meets Anna (played by Melanie Laurent), an actress who has laryngitis. She tells him that he has sad eyes. As he begins to develop a relationship with Anna, flashbacks to his childhood and his father’s living his life as a gay man enter his mind (and on the screen). Anna and Oliver fall in love and he asks her to move in with him, and right away his insecurities arise.
The film ends with him finding his way back to allowing love into his life. One of the great aspects of this film is the use of Arthur, Hal’s dog. This dog plays a prominent part in this film because he embodies faithfulness, unconditional love, and joy.
McGregor is very good as a man who wants and is looking for love in his life but is confused about how to allow it in. Plummer is fantastic as Hal; the man who married for faithful love based in friendship but really wanted to live his truth as a gay man in love. Laurent was perfect as the woman who lives a solitary life on the road being an actress, but really longs to have love in her life. She is looking for someone who can see her. Mike Mills both wrote and directed this film and in both areas he did an outstanding job. The dialogue clear, pithy and poignant while the direction was very crisp and always on target.
Overall: This was a thoughtful joyous film.