“C’mon C’mon” is an ode to making memories

Some people remember the first time Some can’t forget the last Some just select what they want to from the past

In 1992 Mary Chapin Carpenter released her album “Come On Come On”. It spawned seven hit singles but the album’s title track was not one of them. Instead, it served as a pleasant closing song, its vaguely upbeat arrangement a bit out of touch with the beseeching lyrics. But four years later, at Carnegie Hall, Betty Buckley spun Carpenter’s song into something miraculous – something sparer, melancholier and better. With her longtime arranger and musical director Keny Wener and musical director Paul Gemignani, Buckley gave Chapin’s lyrics a home in a new searing arrangement, and the repeated pleas of the speaker to partake in the act of remembrance felt fittingly haunting now: “Come on come on, take my hand / Come on come on, you just have to whisper / Come on come on, I will understand”.

Mike Mills’ new film “C’mon C’mon” (as differentiated from “Come On Come On”) has nothing to do with Carpenter’s song; they just happen to have similar titles. But I’ve been thinking about the echoes of wistfulness in Betty Buckley’s rendition since I watched Mills’ film earlier in December. Both are about memory and how it comes: in waves, by choice or by chance. Mills’ work has always shown great care for memory, and how it mutates. Some might call it nostalgia, although that description feels unapt for the complications of his work. That particular word was bandied about for his last film “20th Century Women” – constructed from anecdotes of his childhood with his mother in the late 1970s. Memorialising runs through his career, though, all the way to his 2001 documentary on paperboys in Stillwater, Minnesota, which found him capturing the lives of paperboys with an elegiac grace that seemed incongruous with the field. His characters always feel as if they are existing in minor keys, sacred in the face of normality. Even the great big things that happen to them are seen through a gaze askance, but never really the focus. It’s the kind of independent filmmaking that gets introduced as quirky, too gossamer thin or too warm or too kind to be really revolutionary or to be listed in the annals of “great” filmmakers, at least not in their time. But Mills is exactly the kind of filmmaker whose gentleness, matched with sharp acuity, might reveal itself as indelible to 21st century American filmmaking when we construct this era in our memories, sometime in the future. He is a filmmaker made for memories.

In “C’mon C’mon,” the legacy of memory is at the forefront of the film, even more explicit than in Mills’ earlier work. Unlike his previous two films, it is set completely in the present, the few flashbacks only go as far back as the previous year. It follows a few sequences of uncle-nephew bonding between Johnny (played by an excellently restrained Joaquin Phoenix), a soft-spoken radio journalist, and Jesse (British-actor Woody Norman, unpredictable and wonderful), his precocious and unpredictable nephew. Johnny has been out of touch with his sister Viv (Jesse’s mother) for a year since their mother, a dementia patient, died. When Johnny reaches out to Viv very early in the film, broaching the separation, she has other things on her mind. Her estranged husband is struggling with mental illness in his new home and she needs to take the trip from Los Angeles to Oakland to help him adapt. Can Uncle Johnny step in? “C’mon C’mon” will build from the misadventures of uncle and nephew as the two learn to understand each other. Preceded by two films explicitly about himself and his family, it feels strange to say that “C’mon C’mon” is the one that gets to the heart of something that has been haunting Mills across his featurefilm career – a capital “R” Romantic engagement with what it means to be a person. What does it mean to construct our identities? How do we choose which memories to build from? In short – how does a person be?

Johnny’s work as a radio journalist gives “C’mon C’mon” its loose structure. He travels around the U.S., interviewing children on their perceptions of the world and soon Jesse becomes part of that structure. The child interviewees meld into the more narrative-bound interactions between Johnny and Jesse, needlingly investigating what it means to be a child in this precarious world. Their answers are thoughtful, surprising, sharp and unusual revealing private struggles. Both Johnny and Jesse are also dealing with their own private struggles. But Mills declines to paint them as exactly the same. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan takes pleasure in framing them in juxtaposition in some of the film’s most striking tableaus – not completely different but not the same. The uncle-nephew relationship is an extension of the mother-son and fatherson dynamics of Mills’ previous films, but it’s not a repetition, or not a repetition of those patterns, at least.

Mills opens the film with the framing device that will be repeated throughout. Johnny and his team meet a new interviewee, and open with a series of repeated questions: “When you think about the future how do you imagine it will be? What will nature be like? How will your city change? Will families be the same? What will stay with you and what will you forget?” The last bit, the bit about memory, is the important part. When the idea of memory is invoked in most film, it’s oftentimes in films that are about the past; films explicitly engaging in a kind of reaching back that comfort you with the notions of recognising what the world felt like then, or what the past feels like now. 2021 has seen many of that kind. It’s the kind of reaching back that Pablo Sorrentino does excellently with the roving camera in “The Hand of God” and Kenneth Branagh a little more self-consciously this year in the less impressive “Belfast”. Filmmaking is about bringing the past to the present. But “C’mon C’mon” isn’t feeding us memories. Instead, Mills is asking us to partake in the ceremony of making memories. In the now. Present tense.

Because Johnny and Jesse have not seen each other in some time, Mills is able to filter some much-needed exposition through these catch-up moments. Recent memories play over conversations, or elongated moments of silences, as Jennifer Vecchiarello’s editing stitches the past into the present with a deliberately dreamy quality. The black-and-white cinematography helps with the dreaminess. Temporality is interrupted as memories are made and unmade. But even the exposition feels reticent and accidental, typical of Mills. Yes, there are real moments of pain that resulted in the schism between Johnny and his sister Viv but Mills never really focuses on that even when he’s nudging at them. When “C’mon C’mon” delves into the crises at the root – Johnny’s previous unsupportiveness with Viv’s estranged husband Paul and his mental illness (Scoot McNairy in an excellent,