Review: 20th Century Women

20th Century Women (15)

USA 2016  118 mins  Dir: Mike Mills  Cast: Annette Bening, Elle Fanning, Billy Crudup, Greta Gerwig, Lucas Jade Zumann

Far superior to many of this year’s Best Picture Oscar nominees, Beginners director Mike Mills’ ’70s-set drama gives under-used Annette Bening the kind of meaty, complex role that actresses of a certain age aren’t supposed to get any more. Her terrific performance deserves a cabinet full of gongs, but 20th Century Women has had to settle for just the one Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay and is at risk of being overlooked in all the La La hype. Those who make the effort to seek it out won’t be disappointed.

In less capable hands, this coming-of-age story about a mother who seeks younger female help in raising her son could have drifted into the territory occupied by all those dreadful landfill Sundance flicks in which a weedy, sensitive kid moons over a Manic Pixie Dream Girl to an insipid, whiny indie soundtrack. Fortunately, Mills uses familiar building blocks to construct a richly characterised, expertly crafted, narratively playful, perceptive and often poignant drama with an undercurrent of melancholy and a strong sense of time and place.

That place is Santa Barbara and the time is 1979. Dorothea (Bening) is a divorced, 55-year-old single mother who occupies a rambling abode that’s apparently held together with scaffolding and seems to be under constant repair and renovation. She has two boarders: spacey aging hippy, handyman and potter William (Billy Crudup), who waffles on about ‘energies’ in authentic New Agey style and struggles to maintain any kind of relationship; and punky amateur photographer and feminist Abbie (Greta Gerwig), who’s recovering from cervical cancer.

Born in 1924 and raised during the Depression, spiky Dorothea is a frequently acid-tongued, often impetuous chain-smoker who’s a little too old to have embraced the bohemian sixties and is slightly ill at ease with the world. She has also reached something of an impasse when it comes to communicating with her skateboarding 15-year-old son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann). “I know him less every day,” she confides sadly to Abbie and teenage neighbour Julie (Elle Fanning), both of whom she recruits to teach him how to be a good man. Abbie seizes the opportunity to fill Jamie’s head with feminism, while nubile, mildly promiscuous therapist’s daughter Julie has taken to clambering up the scaffolding at night to sleep with him as a strictly platonic expression of friendship, which is perhaps not exactly what this horny adolescent needs.

Just as Beginners was inspired by his father, so Mills has said that 20th Century Women is based on his experiences of being raised by women, which perhaps explains why the female characters in this authentically messy, non-traditional household are so well-rounded and could each be at the centre of their own movie. He skilfully weaves together multiple-character voiceovers, including an omniscient one from beyond the grave, and immerses us in the period milieu through documentary footage and collages of stills, at one point drawing upon Koyaanisqatsi and President Carter’s still pertinent ‘crisis of confidence’ speech (“…too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption”) to underline that this is a era in social and political flux. But his lightness of touch means that the film is never heavy going, much fun being had with Dorothea’s attempts to understand punk rock (“They’re not very good and they know that, right?”). It’s also the only film you’ll ever see in which two teenage boys get into a fight about clitoral stimulation.