Mike Mills (2016)

In his previous film, Beginners, the writer-director Mike Mills made a comedy-drama out of his own recent past.  Beginners was based on Mills’s late start in getting a love affair to last and the old age of his father, for whom gay life began at seventy (or thereabouts).  Five years on, Mills has drawn on earlier autobiography:  20th Century Women, set in 1979, is about a mother, Dorothea (Annette Bening), her fifteen-year-old son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) and his sentimental and cultural education.  The principal educator is Dorothea but there are contributions from two others:  twenty-something photographer Abbie (Greta Gerwig), who rents a room in Dorothea’s big, dilapidated house in Santa Barbara; and seventeen-year-old Julie (Elle Fanning), a neighbour.  Mills has described the movie as a ‘love letter’ to the women who raised him – his mother and sisters.  20th Century Women is only his third feature:  you’re bound to wonder, given the sources for this and Beginners, how much ‘original’ material he has left in the locker.  (His debut feature, Thumbsucker (2005), was an adaptation of a novel by someone else – Walter Kirn, who also wrote Up in the Air.)   No matter:  20th Century Women’s benevolent wit and first-rate ensemble acting – everyone’s on the same, right wavelength – make it an entertaining and richly appealing film.

The title is multiply misleading.  The picture’s tone is anything but portentous, its timeframe much narrower than centennial.  While there are three substantial female characters, Dorothea is by far the most important and there are two significant males too:  a second lodger, fortyish William (Billy Crudup), as well as Jamie.  The question of whether Dorothea, Julie and Abbie are representative of their gender and time is less of an issue.  Although Mills and the actresses make the characters so individual that you’re disinclined to see them as typical, an exchange between Dorothea and Jamie re-echoes in your head:  he says, ‘I’m not all men, OK?  I’m just me’ and his mother replies, ‘Well, yes and no …’  Dorothea likes William, a free-spirit car mechanic and a potter on the side, but thinks it might benefit her son to be mentored exclusively by women in the matter of growing up into a properly modern man.  (Jamie’s father departed the scene years ago.)  She enlists Julie’s and Abbie’s help.

Mike Mills describes Dorothea’s scattershot unconventionality, in flashbacks to Jamie’s childhood and in the present.  In the opening scene, as she and Jamie are in a supermarket shopping for her fifty-fifth birthday party later in the day, they watch her motor burning in the car park outside:  Dorothea invites the firemen along to her party that evening as if it’s only polite to do so.  Checking share prices has been part of her morning routine for decades; it’s one that Jamie follows from an early age and we see Dorothea having cross words with a bank manager who won’t let the small boy open and manage his own account.   In another brush with authority, she suggests to Jamie’s teacher that, if her son doesn’t feel like attending school, he may have a good reason for doing so that the teacher should be prepared to accept.  The teacher drily replies that the least he expects is an absence note signed by Jamie’s mother and subsequently gets more than he bargained for.  Dorothea’s eccentricity acquires substance and escapes cuteness thanks to her sense of getting vulnerably older – and old-fashioned:  I was taken with the film’s suggestion that both are equally inevitable and that an unorthodox past is no protection against future superannuation.  Unbeknown to Dorothea, Jamie and Julie already regularly share the same bed (though Julie insists, in spite of Jamie’s increasing carnal curiosity, they keep to their respective sides of it).   It’s the hard-line feminist reading list and tutelage Jamie gets from Abbie which is a bigger problem and enlarges Dorothea’s anxiety about her son’s growing distance from her.

Other than Meryl Streep and Judi Dench, there’s no living film actress I enjoy watching more than Annette Bening.  In a way, she’s more easily enjoyable than those other two:  I’m a dyed-in-the-wool admirer of Streep to the extent that I always feel a bonkers responsibility for what she does; seeing Dench brings with it a persistent sense of regret that she made so few films until she was in her fifties.  Bening has complete command of the screen without a trace of taking charge in a self-assertive way.  Her physical and vocal precision has an almost special effects quality:  it gives the viewer the impression of witnessing intelligence in high definition.  As Dorothea, she’s combative, funny and melancholy in beautiful combination.   As long ago as The Grifters (1990), Pauline Kael described Bening as a ‘superb wiggler’.  In 20th Century Women, she confirms she’s also an all-time-great smoker.  It’s an amusing irony that Dorothea’s movie idol is Humphrey Bogart, especially in Casablanca.  Bening outclasses Bogart in the way she holds a cigarette, in the range of moods she conveys in lighting up and stubbing out.  When William asks Dorothea what was good about the man she was married to, she explains that he was left-handed and she’s right-handed and so he could scratch her back when they were in bed looking at the financial pages together.  ‘Is that all?’ says William.  ‘I loved that!’ replies Dorothea.  Annette Bening’s delivery makes you laugh; because it’s passionately heartfelt, it’s thrilling too.

Elle Fanning and Greta Gerwig are nicely complementary as Julie and Abbie:  Gerwig’s idiosyncratic, abandoned dancing gives the film a few welcome jolts of physical energy and her humour leavens the gloomier parts of Abbie’s story.  It’s good to see Billy Crudup acting freely and imaginatively so soon after undergoing his thankless role in Jackie.  Lucas Jade Zumann copes very well in this strong company – he’s gently witty and the fact that his voice seems more or less to break in the course of the film is touching.   One of my favourite moments is when a male work colleague asks Dorothea if she’d like to go out with him.  She accepts and he says, ‘That’s good because I wasn’t sure if you were a lesbian’.  Dorothea is briefly speechless at this.  ‘So you do want to go out?’ the man persists – almost impatiently and oblivious to the possibility that what he’s said since the first time he asked the same question might have made a difference.  You can see why Dorothea is so keen for Jamie to turn out a newer man.

Although it has a clear storyline, 20th Century Women is essentially fragmentary.  Mike Mills has to step outside the narrative in order to inject surprise and urgency:  halfway through, Dorothea’s voiceover previews her own death twenty years in the future.  The editing is occasionally awkward and I can see that, if you find Mills’s pacific benignity exasperating, Roger Neill’s matching score will make matters worse.  I liked the film, though (more than I did Beginners).  It’s emotionally fluid and expressive of usually well-meant, often messed-up notions of how to live – hard at present not to be nostalgic about that kind of zeitgeist, even if it wasn’t the whole story of 1979.  (As Anthony Lane noted in the New Yorker, that year also saw the coming to power of the Ayatollah Khomeini and Margaret Thatcher.)  And 20th Century Women isn’t soft-hearted in a falsifying way.  Dorothea and Jamie have a climactic conversation that’s also a rapprochement.  Jamie’s concluding voiceover says that he thought at the time this marked a new beginning in their really talking to each other.  In the event, he admits, it marked an end.

14 February 2017