20th Century Women is the latest film from Mike Mills, whose previous film Beginners came out a full six years ago – but the wait has certainly been worthwhile. He’s managed to follow up what was a rather lovely and tender film with an even lovelier and even more tender one, a film that encompasses a sprawling range of themes and sentiments.
It’s set in Southern California in 1979, and centres on Jamie, a fifteen-year-old living with his single middle-aged mother, Dorothea (Annette Bening), in a house she rents out to punk photographer Abby (Greta Gerwig) and hippy handyman William (Billy Crudup). Rounding off the main ensemble is Jamie’s best friend Julie (Elle Fanning), a troubled teen who spends much of her time staying at Jamie’s house.
We grow close to these characters as we learn intimate details about their past, present and future and go through their pleasures and pains alongside them. It’s the rare type of film that not only introduces a relatively large core cast of five but also makes you care about each one of them equally and deeply. By the end, you realise that they’re all very special people, unique people, but that they’re just people, and that there’s billions of other people and that you’re one of them. It’s the feeling of simultaneously mattering a lot and not mattering in the slightest.
The script is among the strongest of recent years. There’s an almost literary quality to the dialogue, with most characters being given a selection of sweeping epigrammatic lines like: “wondering if you’re happy is a great shortcut to just being depressed”, or: “whatever you think your life is going to be like, just know, it’s not gonna be anything like that”. The narrative unfolds naturally, incrementally, at once mirroring life and yet crystallising it. It manages to take in all of the characters’ lives from beginning to end while still focussing on this one specific point in their lives, the summer of 1979.
This sense of time is also conveyed exceptionally well through music, not only through the gentle score by Roger Neill but also through the songs chosen to make up the film’s soundtrack. These are songs that evoke an array of moods, but also songs that function to contextualise the story and characters in a certain place in history and the world. It’s also used quite meaningfully to develop the characters’ identities. Indeed, music forms an integral part of the story itself, with clubs and concerts and dancing to record players in the bedroom featuring heavily in the film.
There is one element of 20th Century Women that did kind of bother me, though. Despite the interesting and well-crafted female characters and the fact that it’s called “20th Century Women”, it’s still a story told through a man, since the main narrative thread is the coming-of-age of a teenage boy and the way the women around him shape him as a person. Yes, it’s a semi-autobiographical film about how Mills himself was shaped by the women around him when he was growing up, and, yes, it does make a change from films primarily about men, but it’s still a concern.
That quibble aside, however, 20th Century Women is beautiful, clever and emotionally complex. There’s a lot of feelings condensed into these two hours. It’ll make you laugh, it might well even make you cry, and, after experiencing all these characters’ lives, it will almost definitely make you sit down and take stock of your own.
20th Century Women is in cinemas June 1st.
Written by Ben Volchok
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