A drama-comedy for the 21st century
Independent filmmaker Mike Mills commented that “making a movie is so hard, you’d better make movies about something you really know.”
In his semi-autobiographical film Beginnings (2010), an adult son (Ewan McGregor) learns that his elderly father (Christopher Plummer) is gay and having the time of his life in a culture of acceptance.
One of the best films since the millennium, 20th Century Women is a semi-autobiographical dramacomedy of a mother, Dorothea (Annette Bening), remembered through the perspective of her 15-year-old son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann).
Set in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1979, 20th Century Women begins with a prologue establishing place, period, and history: the swelling ocean, the city, an old Sports Galaxy spontaneously bursting into flames, and 1920s black and white footage of bob-haired dancers and a circus elephant.
The prologue prepares us for both Jamie’s and Dorothea’s perspectives of life lived in the present tense, with a sharp lens on history.
The ingenious coming-of-age narrative of the teenage boy and his mother entails other characters inhabiting Dorothea’s old home.
Built in 1905, the large rambling home is undergoing full renovation, much as the characters residing there are experiencing personal change.
William (Billy Crudup) is a hippy who fixes things and oversees the renovation project. Twenty-sevenyear old Abbie (Greta Gerwig) photographs everything and dances to relieve the pain of a medical trauma.
Seventeen-year-old Julie (Elle Fanning) routinely climbs the exterior scaffold, entering Jamie’s bedroom through a window to talk and sleep together, never engaging in sex, instead bonding in friendship.
In this smart and entertaining film, the characters represent generational differences and links, forming an extended family at a particular moment in American culture, 1979.
Mills shapes the characters’ shifting points-of-view through progressive voice-overs, with Dorothea connecting her son’s birth to “the period from Vietnam to Nixon on television.” Ruminations carry the film’s momentum, even to Dorothea commenting that Louis Armstrong ’s music should be played at her funeral.
Dorothea’s house is key to the theme of personal and cultural change over the 20th century. Paint cans and renovation tools are visible in each room, but no room is ever fully shown. Re-animating the house, like life, is a work in progress.
Bening ’s chain-smoking gestures alone are a character study in listening and meaningful engagement. Dorothea doesn’t waste words. Her work as an architectural drafter equips her for change and a plan to involve Abbie and Julie in Jamie’s formation as a sensitive 21st century New Man.
Mills constructs a screen teen of scope in Jamie. Daily at breakfast, Dorothera reads the stock market reports and Jamie records the numbers. They watch Casablanca together in an open parental relationship.
Jamie tells Abbie that during the Depression “the whole neighbourhood raised the kids,” and escorts her to a medical appointment.
Abbie shares stories with Jamie about her time in New York and takes him to a local punk club where she prompts him to tell an older woman who tags after him, “Age is a bourgeois construction.”
Abbie and Julie give Jamie feminist literature of the mid-1970s. He is a star pupil, and in a very funny scene instructs a dumb-founded skate-boarder on the centre of women’s sexual pleasure.
The ensemble cast is outstanding portraying characters of substance and charm.
The film’s soundtrack is a study in music scenes from early 20th century crooner Rudy Vallee singing As Time Goes By to the Talking Heads and 1970s punk bands The Clash and The Art Fags.
The film’s epilogue forecasts what the characters become beyond 1979, ending with stunning imagery of a memorable Dorothea.