(USA, 118 min.)
Written and directed by Mike Mills
Starring: Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig,
Elle Fanning, Lucas Jade Zumann, Billy Crudup
 |
| Annette Bening and Lucas Jade Zumann in 20th Century Women. Elevation Pictures |
“What about you?” asks Julie (Elle Fanning) to Dorothea
(Annette Bening). “It’s always about the mother.”
“Ok. Jesus, uh… yeah,” replies Dorothea, dumbstruck,
baffled, and caught slightly off guard.
This moment of psychoanalytic clarity between the teenage Julie and the middle-aged Dorothea comes about partway through 20th Century Women as the latter seeks out her son’s friend to understand the nature of their relationship. Women, the latest dramedy set in the offbeat world of Mike Mills (Beginners) puts the audience into the minds of four great, rich, and wonderful characters: Dorothea, her son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), Jamie’s friend Julie, and Dorothea’s lodger, Abbey (Greta Gerwig).
There are three women and one young man, and while much of the film uses Jamie’s perspective to better understand the women who raise him and shape his life, 20th Century Women smartly and affectionately brings it all back to Dorothea. Whereas too many films define female characters in relation to the men in the story, 20th Century Women defines the male character through his relationship to women. Jamie finds himself in a triangle with Dorothea firmly at the top. This film is all about the mother.
The mother prepares her son by enlisting Julie and Abbey to
help teach Jamie how a boy should respect and understand women. This effort
comes most naturally with Julie, as she is Jamie’s closest confidant in their
strictly platonic sleepovers in which she tells about her kisses. Fanning gives
another mature performance on the heels of The Neon Demon and there’s something both bold and sad about Julie’s need to share
the details of her sex life with the virgin who is clearly head over heels in
love with her. Part of the sexual revolution is learning to talk about what
Dorothea’s generation didn’t talk about, and through Fanning, Julie is a mix of
adolescent hunger and ripe intelligence. She’s read the books and is ready to
test the field.
Abbey, meanwhile, is the Guinea Pig for much of the Women’s
Studies 101 talk that helps Jamie to see a world of equals. Undergoing tests
and treatment for cervical cancer, Abbey confronts the role of motherhood
within the definition of femininity as she enlightens Jamie on theories of gender
equality that more parents should teach their teens.
It helps that Mills gets someone as open and spunky as Greta Gerwig to play Abbey, since, like Bening, the actress knows how to convey a character’s unfamiliar territory. (There’s also a male lodger played by Billy Crudup, who provides a nice harmony to all the associations in the film, especially with Gerwig as Abbey exposes herself through her art.) Abbey awkwardly and caringly gets a feel for her maternal side as she shares her experience as a modern woman—independent, pink-haired, and potentially childless—with Jamie. What makes the performance one of Gerwig’s strongest is the bittersweet irony that lives within Abbey’s affection: she would probably have made a great mother and this is the only chance she might have. The scenes between Bening and Gerwig, particularly a punk bar jaunt in which Abbey tries to help Dorothea get laid in the bar scene, are among 20th Century Women’s best as the film shows a multigenerational exchange as both women get a sense of their time.
It helps that Mills gets someone as open and spunky as Greta Gerwig to play Abbey, since, like Bening, the actress knows how to convey a character’s unfamiliar territory. (There’s also a male lodger played by Billy Crudup, who provides a nice harmony to all the associations in the film, especially with Gerwig as Abbey exposes herself through her art.) Abbey awkwardly and caringly gets a feel for her maternal side as she shares her experience as a modern woman—independent, pink-haired, and potentially childless—with Jamie. What makes the performance one of Gerwig’s strongest is the bittersweet irony that lives within Abbey’s affection: she would probably have made a great mother and this is the only chance she might have. The scenes between Bening and Gerwig, particularly a punk bar jaunt in which Abbey tries to help Dorothea get laid in the bar scene, are among 20th Century Women’s best as the film shows a multigenerational exchange as both women get a sense of their time.
At the heart of Mills’s film is a question of how one
person, any person, understands the time in which he or she lives. Through
voiceover reflections, accelerated frame rates, and montages intercut with
archival images, Mills situates these characters within a continuum: this story
is one that passes from generation to generation as the relationship between parents
and their children changes. Each character in 20th Century Women inevitably circles back to Dorothea
despite her relationship with Jamie.
It’s no surprise that Annette Bening quietly sneaks up on
the film and steals it. Bening gives one of her best performances as the
thoroughly modern matriarch who insists one doesn’t need a man to raise a son.
Like her turn in The Kids Are All Right,
Bening’s coup as Dorothea is on one hand a great comedic performance and a downplayed
dramatic feat on the other as a mother looking out for her family. She’s a
great fit for Mills’s uncontrived and unfussy world: relaxed and ready to
laugh, but also willing to explore herself in some of the film’s frequent
moments of quiet introspection. Scenes of Bening smoking in pensive thought
during 20th Century Women
belong on any clip reel of the year’s cinematic highlights.
A guardedness also underlies many of Dorothea’s interactions
with the younger Julie and Abbey when it comes to raising Jamie. Dorothea is a complex, flawed, and down to
earth woman caught in a transition period between conservatism and second wave
feminism. Like her boy experiencing puberty, Dorothea is in an awkward time of
change, and Bening’s performance thoroughly embraces the mother’s sincere
effort to understand the time in which she and her son come of age. Too old for
the sexual revolution (she tries the punk scene for about five minutes) and too
young to be cranky about the golden days, Dorothea does what any great mother
would do: She embraces the possibilities of the future and does everything in
her might to prepare her child for the wild. It’s the kind of performance and character,
which, hopefully, helps audiences understand and appreciate their moms even
more.
20th Century Women opens in Toronto January 13th
at the Varsity and opens on Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Halifax,
Ottawa on January 20th.
