Kodachrome 40(5)

Mike Mill’s Beginners is at its best when it sticks with the Los Angeles facts:

1. If you live there long enough, you’ll learn to backstroke through the ennui you were warned would drown you and by the time you either move or can afford a house, you’ll be able to spit it nonchalantly through the gap in your two front teeth.

2. Your parents will die while you feel too young for it after a complicated marriage which you recorded incompletely with your young, Super-8-ish mind.

3. You will go to parties in literal or figurative costume and meet a handful of people who look like Melanie Laurent or Ewan McGregor and ruin your life for several months.

I thought I had jettisoned my manic pixie dream girl phase around the same time I started buying real wood furniture and recycling regularly, which I think is sort of the best case scenario sadly, and for the most part I was right. But Melanie Laurent’s character Anna made it apparent I wasn’t quite over it when I found myself momentarily missing the time in my life when I thought something like their situation was a good idea. Namely, driving your car on sidewalks and going out with girls who live in hotels.

Beginners is corny in the right places, in my opinion, and its plush edges lulled me into a handful of deeply meaningful, occasionally-intergenerational moments. It’s not easy to lose a parent, or to allow someone into your life after so much of your concrete feels like it has already set. But it’s possible, and this stretch of film serves as a testament to Jack Gilbert’s oft-quoted (by me and probably 50 other people) line that “anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” I’d only add that Beginners would underline the word “worth” each time it appears there, and would do so without being preachy or untrue.

So, in honor of its particular tone of self-discovery and tempered excitement, I decided to re-soundtrack it with a few songs that felt like they’d fit if it were released today.