20TH CENTURY WOMEN
20TH CENTURY WOMEN Run Time: 120 minutes Starring: Annette Bening, Lucas Jade Zumann, Elle Fanning. Director: Mike Mills
AT VARIOUS points in Mike Mills’s lovely comedydrama about coming of age in a non-traditional family, you might find yourself itching to get out of your seat and dance with the people on-screen as they cut loose to songs from the distant past or from their rapidly spinning present.
As much as the music, the sheer likeability of these lived-in characters is a powerful magnet, thanks to insightful writing and a note-perfect ensemble anchored by a never-better Annette Bening, playing a woman both wise and quizzical, poised right down to her frayed edges.
Along with the actors, the strength of 20th Century Women is the multigenerational sweep of its observations, particularly the pleasing balance of its empathy for the challenges of both the single parent and the adolescent offspring, uncomfortable with all the attention being focused on his emotional development.
That would be Dorothea’s skateboarding son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), with whom she lives in a ramshackle house under constant renovation in Santa Barbara. Abbie (Greta Gerwig) rents a room there, and neighbour Julie (Elle Fanning) is a regular visitor, sleeping in Jamie’s room though insisting on keeping it platonic. There’s also carpenter, mechanic and potter William (Billy Crudup), a gentle soul who’s all about earthy interconnectedness and yet has never been able to find a relationship that sticks.
The movie opens with a final remnant of Dorothea’s marriage, a Ford Galaxie with a faulty engine, bursting into flames outside the supermarket. She invites the firemen to her birthday party that night, an impulse that typifies the immediacy of this post-counterculture sophisticate, who teaches her son according to her own idiosyncratic ethics but frets that her influence alone is not enough. Recognising that Jamie and William don’t connect, she asks Abbie and Julie to help show her son how to be a good man. But he’s irked by his mother’s intervention, creating a cool distance between them for a time.
One key moment has the household gathering around the TV to watch Jimmy Carter give his “Crisis of Confidence” speech, which used the energy crisis as a springboard to reflect on the increasing fragmentation and selfinterest of a nation driven not by community but by materialism.
Mills also uses significant books of the period to key us into his characters. Dorothea reads
Watership Down and Future Shock, classics about societies under threat. As a sexually curious young woman, Julie reads Judy Blume’s Forever…, but being the child of a shrink , she gravitates toward The Road Less Travelled.
Abbie’s work is influenced by reading Susan Sontag’s On
Photography, and the feminist texts she lends Jamie cause a clash with one of his peers, a macho traditionalist who doesn’t appreciate being lectured on clitoral stimulation. In one droll yet painful scene, Jamie reads an essay excerpt to his mother, hoping to unlock answers about her loneliness, only to watch her snap shut.
Divergent music tastes also get Jamie into trouble when he acquires a liking for Talking Heads from Abbie; the band’s cultivated art-rock sensibility is at odds with the hardcore punk that’s cresting. The punk subculture of the time plays a part in the dramatic ferment, and there’s a touching determination in Dorothea’s efforts to understand the raw nihilism of the music. Favouring old standards like As
Time Goes By, she listens intently to Black Flag singing about going berserk in Nervous Breakdown, crinkling up her face and asking with hilarious earnestness, “Is that interesting?”
For a movie running a full two hours, relatively little happens, at least until lovelorn Jamie takes flight with Julie to San Luis Obispo, where he hopes their friendship will escalate to romance. But the film never feels like it’s meandering, instead assembling exquisitely observed moments that coalesce into a portrait of how our lives are shaped by those closest to us and by cultural touchstones. The brightness and warmth of the visuals echo the tone to a tee.
Fanning is luminous as Julie talks candidly about regretting hooking up with guys half the time, but details the things that make the other half memorable.
But the movie belongs to Bening. This is a woman who in some ways is open and spontaneous, but in many others unknowable. Bening gives radiant life to all her complexities. Even her solitude. – Hollywood Reporter