Director Mike Mills is back after six years with another sensitive exploration of family life, following the 2010 release of Beginners, a fictionalized story of his father who came out of the closet past the age of seventy. Here Mills tackles a coming of age tale set in Santa Barbara, California, circa 1979.
Mills' strong suit is his characters, all of whom exude a heady verisimilitude. The main focus is on the relationship between a divorced mother, Dorothea (Annette Benning) and her teenage son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann). Dorothea has two boarders in her home: the 20ish photographer Abbie (Greta Gerwig) and aging hippie carpenter William (Billy Crudup). Also in the mix is teenager Julie (Elle Fanning) who develops a platonic friendship with Jamie, and often sleeps over in Jamie's bedroom without his mother's knowledge.
Throughout the film, Mills provides a back story for each of the protagonists in a series of flashbacks, narrated in voice-overs by one of their principal counterparts (Dorothea's back story is narrated by Jamie, for example). He intersperses documentary footage and still images that correspond to the era in which each character grew up in. Titles of prominent books from the 70s also manage to find their way into the narrative as bookmarks of sorts, coupled with a soundtrack that features a combination of an ethereal-sounding theme along with late 70s punk music.
Each character has a distinctive history--whether it's the chain-smoking Dorothea, troubled by her lack of a relationship with a man; the equally troubled Jamie, pining away for Julie, who won't reciprocate his desire to become intimate, and fears that she's been impregnated by a teenager who's simply used her for sex; Abbie, dealing with a diagnosis of cervical cancer; and William, once a member of a hippie commune and unable to break his habit of desiring casual sex with women.
For a while, Mills' plot keeps one's interest. There's Jamie's rebellion against his mother which leads to reckless behavior—at one point, the rebellious teenager almost is asphyxiated while playing a deadly choking game with a group of other reckless teenagers. Abbie finds out that her cancer isn't fatal and also gets what turns out to be a false diagnosis that she won't be able to have children anymore. She also propositions William and they sleep together.
At a certain point (perhaps 90 minutes into the film), Dorothea reveals in a voice-over that she'll die of cancer in 1999. We're expecting Mills to wrap things up at this point but no, he drags his story out to almost an unnecessary two hours in length.
The problem is that there's little variation or suspense in resolving the problem in Dorothea and Jamie's relationship. Early on Dorothea tells Jamie, "we've got to talk," and Jamie replies, "whatever." It seems we hear the same thing at the end of the film which suggests there's little new to learn about the ongoing mother-son conflict.
Mills introduces a long-winded dinner table scene in which Abbie castigates those in attendance for being embarrassed talking about "menstruation." Later, Dorothea tells Abbie she's been a bad influence on Jamie, pointing him in the wrong direction with her new-found feminist interests.
Finally, the big "resolve" is hardly a bang and much more of a whimper. Jamie and Julie drive up the coast and settle in a cabin where Jamie's "nice guy" routine fails for the last time to entice Julie into bed. When he disappears, Julie frantically calls Dorothea, who drives up with Abbie and William, to find the errant son. But when they get there, Jamie has suddenly returned and the air feels like it's totally dissipated from the proverbial balloon.
The fate of the principals, so emotionally descriptive, is perhaps the best part of the film. The narration informs what happens to all the protagonists, with Dorothea finding happiness with a new man in her life and Jamie eventually reaching adulthood and fathering a child.
20th Century Women features good acting all-around, with Annette Benning aptly conveying the confusion of a mother whose teenage son displays stirrings of desire to leave the nest. Mills' characters are endearing but his episodic description of what happens to them eventually wears out its welcome. This is a film that could have been almost half an hour shorter and somehow Mills needed to think harder about how to build suspense and bring his 20th Century Women to a more satisfying conclusion.
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