Director: Mike Mills
Year Released: 2010
Rating: 1.0
A graphic artist (Ewan McGregor) is told by his father (Christopher Plummer) that not only does he have lung cancer, but he also was hiding his homosexuality his entire life and wants to spend his remaining time 'living it up.' The editing is off-putting - it leaps back and forth in time, as McGregor thinks back to his childhood (and his acid-tongued mother, played wonderfully by Mary Page Keller) and his father's dying years while in the middle of a difficult relationship with a young actress (Mélanie Laurent), which all appears to be a misguided stylistic choice (the cutting, to me, seems random). The heavy amount of quirkiness, too, does not succeed in off-setting the inherent morbidity: this is, deep down, a movie wallowing in its own sorrow, and the 'cute components' (Laurent with laryngitis, McGregor narrating over old still photos, McGregor's morbid drawings, Goran Visnjic as Plummer's bubbly boyfriend) only seem to clash with (instead of compliment) the seriousness taking place. Plummer's character is fun and entrancing but I don't feel like McGregor's character is properly upset with the fact that his Dad basically lived a lie or asks enough critical questions of him, which shows, in a way, how disingenuous this is at its very core.
