Beginners (2011)

The movie is seen through the eyes, the sensibility and the inevitably somewhat ambiguous life experience of Oliver (Ewan Macgregor), a 38 year old single man. When the film opens, the year is 2003, and Oliver's father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), a retired museum director, has just died of cancer at the age of 79. Who is gay. Something Oliver did not know until his mother died when his father was 75, and came out. He was married to Oliver's mother for 44 years but that wasn't the real him. As Oliver tells us, Georgia checked in her Jewishness and Hal his homosexuality at the altar. Now that she is gone, he is ready to be really truely out there in your face gay. And he does a brilliant job of it.
When Hal comes out of the closet he shocks his easily shocked son with his frankness. Hal finds a younger lover, Andy (Goran Visnjic), through an encounter column, and throws himself into the gay community and its politics. He then enjoys a remarkable Indian summer of happiness before stoically living with cancer in his final months, which Oliver nurses him through, all the while taking in this new father image.
In the midst of the grief he is feeling for the loss of his father, he is trying to bring what he learned from his father into his new relationship with a woman (Mélanie Laurent), which makes you cringe and laugh at the same time.
Beginners is funny, moving, and it draws you in. The acting is beyond reproach, with Christopher Plummer bringing delightful wit, compassion and unsanctimonious grace to the role of Hal. In its quiet, unostentatious way, it's one of the best films I've seen about the World War II generation's experience of living through and responding to the profound social changes of the past 60+ years.