Year: 2016
Genre: Drama
Directed: Mike Mills
Stars: Annette Bening, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Lucas Jade Zumann, Billy Crudup, Alison Elliott, Thea Gill, Vitaly Andrew LeBeau, Waleed Zuaiter, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Curran Walters, Alia Shawkat
Production: Anna Purna Pictures
The scene feels remarkably familiar – Dorothea (Bening), the
matron and saint of a Santa Barbara household circa 1979 leans in on her son Jamie
(Zumann) listening to “Fairytale in the Supermarket” by The Raincoats. “They
know they sound terrible right?” she says. Abbie (Gerwig), Dorothea’s avant-garde lodger interjects; “yeah, but it’s like they don’t care. They got
all this feeling but don’t have the tools they need to express it…it all comes
out as passion.” Dorothea fixates on Abbie’s intonation, like listening to
language she’s only now grasping. She gets it...but then she doesn't.
Much like Abbie’s defense of The Raincoats, Dorothea
believes she has all the passion to be a proper mother, but she lacks the right
tools to support a son who is growing older with each passing moment. She
decides to enlist the help of two young women; Julie, Jamie’s best friend and
crush and Abbie a free spirit who was recently treated for cervical cancer. The only other man
in the picture is William (Crudup) a well-meaning former hippie with a gift for
mechanics and a passion for pottery. Between them all, the stalwart Dorothea
hopes to quietly guide her son through his formative years which pit her
depression era approach, to Jamie’s recession era resentments. “Don’t you need a
man to raise another man?” asks Julie. “No I don’t think you do.”
Nothings more hardcore than political suicide. |
20th
Century Women starts with competing voice-overs and uses a collage approach
to convey the surfaces of each character’s inner life. The collages are stuffed
to the brim with stills of 1930’s gloom and 1960’s turbulence all set to audio
of proto-punk, Jimmy Carter’s Malaise Speech and “As Life Goes By” from Casablanca
(1942). It's an awkward mix; one that creates an echo chamber of sorts.
That subtle discordance of people talking at and not to each other, runs through the first half
of the film. Jamie’s coming-of-age story, a volatile mix of stubborn familial
resentment and unrequited love clobbers together with Dorothea’s own midlife
crisis. “I had Jamie when I was 40.” Dorothea says; a fact that can help
explain Dorothea’s free-range parenting approach, but also helps explain why
Jamie’s sharp insights cut so deep. For a while there it always seems like its
Jamie versus Dorothea, pulled apart by an ever widening generational gap.
This movie's interpretation of the passage of time. |
Then, like responding to the blessing of a wartime parlay,
the factions in this film begin to center and calm. It is during this truce
that the film begins to really take off, presenting its characters with
vibrancy and humanity while flying through a more nuanced story arc. Almost
independently both Jamie and Dorothea learn their goals are one in the same and
the differences they have are little compared to their mutual respect for time
which presents itself in rainbow tinged tracking shots and subtle
fast-forwards.
And at the center of 20th
Century Women lies the affable Annette Bening who suitably captures the
zeitgeist of a generation no longer with us. While most might pigeonhole
Dorothea as a madcap eccentric or worse a passive pushover, Bening wisely lets
the character’s inner strength shine through. Dorothea is unabashedly a one of
a kind lady. She invites strangers to dinner, invites herself to punk clubs,
leaves early, and then comes back days later alone. She verves uncomfortably
with post-sexual revolution mores yet she quietly takes frank conversations about
menstruation in stride. She does all this because she knows that with every
encounter, every meeting, every stranger there’s a chance for exchange.
So we're all in agreement, Jaime is the alpha and omega |
Of course 20th
Century Women is not without its problems. While Bening, Gerwig and Fanning
all do wonders in their roles, Zumann fails to endear the young Jamie to the
audience in any meaningful way. Part of it is due to the part as it is written.
The film is loosely based on the life of director Mike Mills thus Jamie at
times feels more like an avatar than a real teenager. Additionally it’s ironic
that despite constant paraphrasing of feminist literature, 20th Century Women would struggle to pass the Bechdel
Test. Our three women characters orbit Jamie’s life and analyze his actions and
motives like he’s the center of their universe.
Yet, while the film uses the wider Women's Liberation movement as window dressing, allowing the external conflicts of the film to melt away
to reveal honest internal pain was a stroke of genius. Genius enough to maybe be
interpreted as a meta-text on standard storytelling practices being a form of
patriarchal oppression. That however is a discussion for another day.
20th Century Women is an
artfully rendered film with plenty to say about the passage of time, the
commonality between the generation gaps and the unifying love of mother and
son.
Final Grade: B-
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