Back to the ungovernable beauty of life

life ought to be, and hating every minute of it.

Brilliantly channelled by Bening, in a performance that’s spiky and soft; weathered and gentle, Dorothea emerges as a mercurial bundle of contradictions whose panic at losing her son is only tempered by her gift for lacerating observation.

“Wondering if you’re happy is a great short cut to just being depressed,” she offers, in a typical aside, cutting straight through 1970s-era self-help culture. Moments later, she’s resisting the dissonance and aggression of the punk music Abbie pogoes to in her room: “Can’t things just be pretty?” she asks plaintively.

Jamie might be the protagonist of 20th Century Women, but the movie earns its title, in that the female characters are by far the most fully realised and fascinating. In addition to Bening, Gerwig gives her finest performance in recent memory, submerging her familiar (and delightful) daffy persona to portray a character on her own sometimes-heartbreaking search for meaning and purpose.

She figures in one of the most important sequences in 20th Century Women, when Jamie accompanies Abbie on a solemnly consequential appointment. That’s when he learns – at the prodding of Dorothea – to manage his male instinct to “fix everything.”

Later, Abbie gives him Sisterhood is Powerful and Our Bodies, Ourselves and he decides that, “maybe I’m a feminist”. (The movie is threaded through with pungent evocations of the era, from snippets of Jimmy Carter’s “crisis of confidence” speech to the strains of Talking Heads, Black Flag and the Raincoats. Mills has even gone to the trouble of recreating one of the very first early pregnancy tests.)

Like Moonlight did earlier this season, 20th Century Women looks at male identity through the lens of the social forces that condition it – in this case, through the portrayal of masculinity at its most selfconscious and performative (as Abbie might say).

Dorothea’s attempts to tutor her son in the ways of manhood feel organic and true, but they’re also Mills’s sly way of interrogating privilege, as Jamie tentatively explores ways, not to dominate the world, but to move through it with integrity and sensitivity.

This film is warm and funny, like Dorothea, but willing to be tough when it needs to. As a celebration of personal and social history, 20th Century Women takes the audience back.

But it also lifts us up on a wave of open-hearted emotion and keen intelligence. It bursts with the sad, messy, ungovernable beauty of life. – The Washington Post