The protagonist of 20th Century Women is a teenage boy who’s trying really hard to understand women. He calls himself a feminist at one point, and makes a point to let women know of his awareness of their bodies, their misfortunes and their thoughts. There’s a sincerity to his quest that is incredibly commendable, and it feels in part like a metaphor for what filmmaker Mike Mills is doing with his latest film. 20th Century Women explores the lives of the different women who revolve around Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), a high school kid who’s learning fast about love and life, illness and death. Perhaps a little too fast. This is the worry of Jamie’s mother, Dorothea (Annette Bening), a single mother and an eternally maternal figure who struggles constantly with trying to find the right balance between exposure and protection, between letting Jamie live his life and living it for him. Mills’ previous film, Beginners, was a masterpiece in which a man’s troubled love life is effected, in part, by a complicated childhood with an overbearing mother. 20th Century Women shares the same spirit with Beginners, even if it isn’t quite as piercing. It still shows Mills’ talent for showcasing the more existential questions of life with a beaut3wy unlike any other filmmaker today.

After Jamie is left unconscious from a silly game with friends, Dorothea becomes panicked with the thought that she is somehow derelict in her motherly duties. Dorothea is a friendly, generous woman, but her life is clouded with melancholy and loneliness – even Jamie can notice it. Living in Santa Barbara, California, Dorothea is a divorceé in her fifties who was raised in The Depression and feels compelled to make sure her son does not end up in the same despondent position that she finds herself in now. They live in a two-story fixer upper, and they rent rooms out to Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a red-haired photographer who’s recently overcome a bout with cervical cancer, and William (Billy Crudup), an older, mustachioed handy man who makes bowls and can fix any engine put in front of him. Outside of his hectic home, Jamie is in love with Julie (Elle Fanning), a childhood friend who has grown into a true beauty and whose insecurity has led her into an exploration of casual sex with all kinds of high school boys – except Jamie. Desperate for help, Dorothea calls upon Abbie and Julie to help in Jamie’s maturation, to help him become a better man. Her request for assistance is met, at first, with resistance from her son, but as Abbie and Julie begin advising Jamie in the ways of men and women, he begins to view his future, and his mother, with new eyes.

Both of Mills’ features have an appreciation for the unpredictability of life, and an understanding that the people in life who may help you may not even be the ones you want to, but just those who happen to be around. 20th Century Women is much more rambling than Mills’ previous film. Its ideas are much more macro than Beginners and it has scenes that can feel a bit bloated because of this, but it still contains some absolutely wonderful scenes that tap into a sense of human ennui that feels unique. His films can feel hip and sentimental at the same time. 20th Century Women is filled with characters inflated by liberal ideals, but Mills still makes them interesting and contradictory. His script swirls around ideas of feminism and existentialism, and the characters read texts that heighten the sense of their human experience, but it does not stop their behavior from falling into the same pitfalls that humans constantly stumble into. Jamie explores feminist writings in an attempt to finally sleep with Julie, Abbie’s outward projection of stylistic boldness belies a real emotional fragility, and all of Dorothea’s attempts to help Jamie and others comes out of a place that is desperately afraid of her own loneliness. In attempting to stir Jamie away from her romantic isolation, she may lead him straight to it. Mills understands the separation between ideals and behavior, that it’s your actions that tell those who you really are, not what you read.

Calling an Annette Bening performance extraordinary can feel redundant at times, but in what other way does one describe her work here? There’s such unbelievable grace with each line reading and such powerful humor to her reactions to the oncoming of punk and pop feminism. The mother from Beginners was a peripheral character (though brilliantly portrayed by Mary Page Keller), only highlighted through eccentricities, where Bening’s Dorothea is more fully realized. She cares most deeply for her son, but still has time to have her own wants and needs – even if she doesn’t manage to have time to fulfill them. Alongside Bening may be the greatest performance I’ve ever seen Greta Gerwig give. Abbie is a tragic character, emotionally damaged by family, men and illness. Gerwig’s portrayal is funny and heartbreaking, the indie queen’s specialty, but I’ve never seen her master such a wide range of emotions as she does here. Her striking red hair alludes to a punk iconography, but Gerwig is not simply playing punk rock, but a truly real woman with real, life-altering problems. As William, Crudup continues to be one of the movies’ most supportive actors, and here he gives a performance of such generosity and tenderness, it seems to function mostly as a boost to all the other actors, but still manages to feel individualistic and charming.

Perhaps there are aspects of 20th Century Women that feel like plot run-off from Beginners, but his latest film does approach femininity in a way unlike most films do these days. It still comes from a man, and the story is told through a male point-of-view, so the images are still romantic and idealized more so than reality would suggest. But like Beginners, I do feel like the film and Mills’ script still possess a kind of thoughtfulness and a recognition of the small details that add to our happiness and sadness throughout our lives. Having as strong an ensemble as this film happens to have helps greatly, and having an actress as brilliant and legendary as Annette Bening is about as good a resource as any filmmaker can possess, but the material is very strong here. Mills sees the fluidity of time and illustrates it in his films. The events exist in a vacuum within the narrative, but also as a single period in a continual progression of events. He does not place particular value on events just because they happen to take place in a movie. Despite this, he still continues to tell his stories, and we should all thank him for that.

 

Written and Directed by Mike Mills