20th Century Women Reviews

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since there was a solid cast involved, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, even though this movie had been fairly well received by the critics, to be honest, I had a hard time to really care for it. I mean, the characters had some potential and they were above all intriguing as a group. Unfortunately, the makers didn’t do much with the fact that they were all living together in one big house which was, in my opinion, the most interesting aspect about the whole thing. Instead, they focused on some of their personal issues but these issues were all barely interesting, at least, as far as I was concerned. I mean, I did get that Dorothea was basically projecting her own loneliness and insecurities onto her only child but, to be honest, this process was rather tedious to behold. Seriously, there was really nothing wrong about Jamie, he was indeed an average still rather thoughtful but above all fairly stable teenager living in a pretty sweet household. As a result, it became borderline annoying at some point that his mother kept complaining that he might need some help for some issues she basically cooked up in her own mind. Concerning his relationship with Julie, it was not much better since this girl acted like a rather annoying tease. It was even pointed out by Abbie, the fact it was rather cruel that she would crawl virtually every night in Jamie’s bed but still refused to have sex with him while it was pretty obvious that he was completely head over heels for her. I won’t blame the cast (Annette Bening , Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup), they all delivered some pretty good performances, it’s just that I never really cared for the direction they took with this material. Anyway, to conclude, even if this movie never really worked for me, it was still a decent watch and I think it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre. 

As with his prior film, Beginners, Mike Mills excels at telling stories in which the major drama is just the pains, sorrows, and growths of everyday life. There’s no overpowering personal crisis to overcome and grow out of, just the normal frustrations and aggressions of being a teenager and flailing about for your identity. 20^th Century Women could play as the spiritual cousin or response to Beginners’ story of a father and son repairing their relationship and finding romantic partners.

We meet five specific characters, each of them fully realized and complete, each of them an absolute joy to spend two hours with. There’s Dorothea Fields (Annette Bening, never better), the chain-smoking single mother with the piercing gaze and yearning to connect with a teenage son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), she doesn’t quite understand. There’s Julie (Elle Fanning), the troubled and depressed best friend of our main character, prone to sleeping in his bed (platonically) while forcing him to listen to her stories of sexual escapades. And Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a cherry red haired photographer overcoming cervical cancer who introduces Jamie to punk music and feminism. Also hovering around in the background is William (Billy Crudup), a leftover hippie that is helpful with household chores and generally directionless.

Centering all of these characters, I suppose you could call them quirky, is Jamie as he struggles to develop into manhood. By his own admission, he wants to be a good guy. By god, he means it, and I think he’ll turn out ok in the end. We believe in and root for these characters thanks to the strength of Mills script. He creates fully realized people, complete with their own eccentricities and failings. As 20^th Century Women comes to a close, I wasn’t entirely ready to say goodbye to these characters, especially Dorothea who remains one of the most intriguing.

The backbone of the film is Dorothea’s realization that her presence alone may not be enough for Jamie’s development as he transitions into adulthood, and she asks each of the other characters to share their lives and thoughts with him to aide his growth. How exactly this will help him no one is quite sure, but they agree to it anyway. It’s this kind of tenderness and compassion that makes 20^th Century Women such a wonderful experience. I also appreciate the subtle, and poetic, imagery of Dorothea’s, and by extension Jamie’s, house being permanently under repair and renovation, as if it too was trying to build itself into a better version of itself.

There’s a novelistic sense of character and history that pervades throughout Beginners and 20^th Century Women. We could just as easily followed around Julie’s coming-of-age developments with Dorothea, Abbie, and Jamie playing supporting players while she experimented with sex and drugs as a rebellion against her therapist mother. We could have followed Abbie’s early punk days in the New York art scene where she got into a relationship with an older man and discovered the cancer that sent her back home. These characters are afforded the type of internal lives and behaviors that other films invest in only one or two. It’s operating on a level that could easily transpose itself into a documentary format.

Even better is how Mills weaves in the soundtrack into the frame of the narrative. 20^th Century Women is something of a memory piece of Jamie’s, with each of the other characters narrating parts of their lives and their futures, so it makes sense that the soundtrack of his youth occupies such a large space. This also affords us the sight of Annette Bening listening to Black Flag with complete befuddlement before dancing around a bedroom with Billy Crudup to Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food. It’s a tiny moment, but one that I treasure deeply for the way it expresses Dorothea’s anxiety about connection and understanding with her son.

As 20^th Century Women closes, with Dorothea driving and Jamie holding onto the car while he skateboards, it reveals as a love letter to these extraordinary women who molded him. Memories can easily tilt into neurotic acts of self-mythology or molding, but Mills finds the perfect balance to keep everything feeling grounded and real. There were bigger movies that dominated the Oscar season this year, but many of them will be forgotten in short order while something as quiet and lovable as this will hopefully outlive them to find the bigger audience it deserves.