Bening proves star quality
Actress triumphs in motherly role highlighting relationship issues in the late ’70s
THERE are things in life that passeth all understanding: bubble tea, aviation and how Annette Bening failed to get an Oscar nomination for her career-best work in 20th Century Women.
Bening neither hogs the film, nor ever seems like the sole point of it, which is maybe how a performance this nuanced and glorious slips through the cracks.
Writer-director Mike Mills brings us five characters in Santa Barbara in 1979, and illuminates five whole American lives – from cradle right through to grave, in one case – that chime and clash with their moment.
It’s about social and generational shifts – the last days of punk; the brink of Ronald Reagan; what feminism meant in this place and time. And it’s about a mother and son raising each other, with a little help from the other flawed souls they rely on.
Bening is Dorothea, a 55-year-old divorcee, who talked herself once into romantic attachment and has never been hugely tempted to try again. She has Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), a slight, chronically sullen 15-year-old, trying to figure out what’ll make him happy why his mother is still alone and whether this gets her down.
Dorothea is based on Mills’s own mother, just as Christopher Plummer’s character in his last film, the similarly sweet-souled Beginners (2010), was a portrait of his dad.
Bening is a perfectly braided mixture of conviction and confusion, clinging to her certainties like life-rafts in a changing world. Colleagues speculate that she might be a lesbian (she isn’t) and when one awkwardly asks her out, she dilutes the gesture with a group dinner at home. She and her son are self-sufficient, in their way, but she’s also a child of the Depression, and knows the importance of community through good times and bad.
They share their grand, rickety old house with two tenants – an affable handyman called William (Billy Crudup), who beds women easily but never quite knows what to do with them afterwards, and Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a New York-taught art student, with a Bowie-inspired shock of red hair, who is recovering from cervical cancer.
This mid-20th-century woman is introduced at her most twitchily vulnerable; one of the film’s long-range, lightly managed projects, which falls to the tremendous Gerwig, is watching her find her groove again.
Dorothea sees lessons everywhere. Abbie offers some. So, near-unwittingly, does Julie (Elle Fanning), who is two years older than Jamie, at an age when two years make all the difference. This childhood friend likes to snuggle in his bed and chat, but he clearly, painfully, wants more, and suffers from the taunting knowledge of everything she’s doing with other guys.
20th Century Women is a tribute not only to Mills’s ma but to a great actress at the peak of her powers. The film itself is the gold statuette. – The Telegraph