Scrambled hearts: "Beginners"

In the American cinema, quirky tends to come in two varieties: droll, gnomic, take-it-or-leave-it quirky (of which the films of Hal Hartley remain a fine example) or a sort of love-me quirky, which pleads with the viewer to take all its idiosyncracies as compensation for a steadfast refusal to engage with the ways of the real world. (There are human beings like this, too.) Someone like Wes Anderson, with his weird contempt for both his characters and his audience, flits back and forth between these two forms. Beginners, the second feature from writer-director Mike Mills after the sweet yet thin Thumbsucker, falls squarely into the latter camp.

Here we find characters who do nothing but doodle all day, despite the implorings of their talking dog. Or characters who arrive at fancy-dress parties done up as Sigmund Freud, and have their fellow guests lining up to lie down on a sofa and unburden themselves of their traumas. These are people who rollerskate indoors, who drive their cars along the sidewalk BECAUSE THEY JUST DON'T PLAY BY THE NORMAL RULES. Beginners isn't just love-me quirky, it's marry-me quirky, have-my-children quirky, stay-will-me-til-death quirky. For those of a certain disposition, it will be nails-down-a-blackboard quirky.

An innately scatterbrained proposition, the film scrambles the four relationships at its heart like eggs, in the hope of making the point that when it comes to love, none of us really know anything. At its centre is the decision of to-this-point hetero Christopher Plummer to come out at the age of 75; chopped up and thrown in around this development is the relationship between Plummer and his lonely, mopey illustrator son Oliver (Ewan McGregor, possibly a Mills analogue); we flash back to see scenes from the tough childhood Oliver endured at the hands of his unstable mother; and we lurch ahead to explore the rapport Oliver strikes up, after his father's death, with quirky mademoiselle Mélanie Laurent, who has laryngitis for the first third of the movie and thus has to communicate everything she wants to say on a teeny-tiny notepad that, miraculously, never seems to run out of paper. (Like I said: marry-me quirky.)

Mills previously made a lovely, stylised-documentary short about paperboys, which let its subject tell their own stories, catching their idiosyncracies on the fly. Beginners - rather like Thumbsucker before it - is the work of a filmmaker who's simply trying too hard, and only in its later stages, where you sense Mills starting to relax and the film coming to settle down, does it begin to have the emotional effect that it's aiming for. There is a crisis of sincerity in the American cinema at the moment, and Beginners feels as much a victim of this as a possible cure: it wants to address what it is to be gay, or Jewish, or dying, but it doesn't trust an audience to turn out for that movie, instead taking refuge in notionally crowdpleasing kooks and quirks.

Trouble is, the more quirks you load on a character, the less freedom the actors have to cultivate actual character traits - those human elements that might get us to warm to these people, or indeed to get us to think of them as real people in the first place, in order to get us to care when harsh reality kicks in. The actors struggle manfully with the burden. McGregor, currently getting more interesting roles in the States than he's had in the UK for a while, gives Oliver a quietness and gentle gravity that keeps threatening to touch upon something resonant and meaningful. It's just a pity he should be paired with Laurent, whose Frenchness becomes merely a signifier for a standard-issue, out-of-the-box kook; the ups and downs of the couple's relationship are as arbitrary as those in any J-Lo romcom.

Which leaves us with Plummer, who huffs and puffs and bluffs his way through one of those late-bloomer roles beloved of matinee crowds, awards committees and Oscar voters; the wholly unfaked twinkle in his eye gets him so far, but it's a performance that offers no real sense of what it is to have gone gay overnight at the age of 75, beyond the fact it seems to involve wearing a brightly coloured cravat. The scenes between father and son - evoking filial regret and paternal devotion - are where Beginners comes closest to being the mature, philosophical work it wants to be. The rest, alas, is sophomoric, and more than just a little bit rote: it's a disease-of-the-week movie with a funny hat on.

Beginners opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow.