Is there a difference between watching a sequence of images and watching a movie? The movie Beginners tells the tale of a man coming of age romantically (at 38) and grappling with the recent death of his father. It’s told in a disarmingly straightforward manner. But its director Mike Mills, who’s an accomplished graphic designer, enlivens the central narrative with a handful of montages, streams of still images narrated by the hero in voice-over. The images are culled from stock photographs, vintage postcards and the director’s own loopy illustrations. These sequences are visual knock-outs – my eyes literally opened wider to take them in – and also deeply effecting, perhaps even more so than the live-action portions of the film, which are played out skillfully by the actors but sweetened with hopelessly sentimental touches, like a dog with subtitles to broadcast his thoughts.
While I loved the montage sequences I can’t help feeling they were out of place, that they were graphic design rather than movie. It’s the same way I feel about Ray and Charles Eames’ movies like Top and Powers of Ten. They’re constructed from moving images, but each retains its iconic power as an image without giving itself over to the life of the movie. Like the montages in Beginners, these sequences are governed by the logic of graphics and text – the logic of illustration. The montages in Beginners achieve a kind of graphic poetry but they’re powerfully disruptive, and take away from the rest of the movie. I almost wish Mills had done away with the actors altogether and constructed the entire movie from still images. It would have made this small, touching movie enthralling.