A BOY AND HIS MOTHER
Annette Bening is a standout in artfully feminist coming-of-age story
Writer/director Mike Mills has already made a film based on his father (the 2010 coming-out comedy/drama Beginners, with Christopher Plummer), and now he turns to his mother and sister for the inspiration behind 20th Century Women. Cousins and inlaws, take note; you may be next!
The setting is 1979 Santa Barbara. Fifteen-year-old Jamie (Mills stand-in Lucas Jade Zumann, looking, tragically, like a young Anton Yelchin), is growing up in the care of his single mother, Dorothea (a meaty role for Annette Bening), who has just turned 55. He also has a role model in 20-something lodger Abbie (Greta Gerwig), and a close friendship with a neighbour, 17-year-old Julie (Elle Fanning), the intimate platonic-ness of which is driving him crazy.
Mills has called his film a love letter to the women in his life, but its male point of view — everything revolves around Jamie trying to figure out how to be a good man, and all these women trying to help him — gave me pause. I’m not even sure it passes the Bechdel test, which requires any two female characters to have a conversation about something other than a man.
And yet the women are drawn so fully, and so artfully, that I had to give the film a conditional pass. And Jamie, when he’s not listening to punk music or moodily skateboarding along the winding roads near his California home, can often be seen reading Susan Lydon’s The Politics of Orgasm, or the feminist anthology Sisterhood is Powerful. (Onscreen credits and voice-overs helpfully spell out the reading list, and also years of birth and sometimes death for the main characters.)
The era provides for some great set decor — old VW Beetles, punk clubs, early pregnancy tests that look like chemistry sets — without the distraction of modern media; this was a time when an entire household might gather in the living room to watch Jimmy Carter’s “crisis of confidence”
speech on television. And the questions being asked by its characters — Jamie, but also the women — are timeless.
“How do you be a good man?” is a query made by every generation, and one the previous cohort always seems to have a better handle on than your own. Is it strength? Being able to physically satisfy someone? A way of smoking? The books you read? And so is Jamie’s response a version of everyone’s eventual understanding. “I’m not all men; I’m just me.”
That description also sums up Billy Crudup’s lovely supporting turn as William, another lodger paying for his rent in handyman services. He might be the most confused character in the film, too old to be a boomer, too young to be part of the Greatest Generation. (Dorothea, in contrast, is “from the Depression,” according to her son.) “I make my own shampoo,” William says while attempting to make love to Abbie — a more trying-to-fit-into-the1970s line has never been written.
Jamie, as a confused and still somewhat unformed adolescent, registers (rightfully) as something of a cypher on the screen, but the female roles are wonderfully intricate psychological knotwork, and the actresses step into them masterfully. If “onenote” represents one end of the scale of complexity, these are symphonic.
An interesting chronological side note: If one chooses to define womanhood as starting at 17, then the first of the 21st-century women are only just about to start to come into being. All women are 20th-century women, and everyone was born of one. That’s a huge debt of gratitude owing, and one this thoughtful film manages to begin to pay off.