20^th Cen­tu­ry Women

This is a film best under­stood as writer/​director Mike Mills’ attempt to cap­ture his child­hood through a fic­tion­alised shag­gy-dog com­e­dy dra­ma. Describ­ing it as anchored by real­i­ty doesn’t con­vey the free­dom giv­en over to a gift­ed ensem­ble and the result­ing sparks of spon­tane­ity that occa­sion­al­ly burst into a deliri­ous­ly off-kil­ter form of humour.

The set­ting is sun­ny South­ern Cal­i­for­nia in 1979 and 16-year-old Jamie (Lucas Zumann) is sur­round­ed by women. There’s his moth­er Dorothea (Annette Ben­ing), his best friend and long-term crush Julie (Elle Fan­ning) and their pho­tog­ra­ph­er lodger Abbie (Gre­ta Ger­wig). In what appears to be a nar­ra­tive kick­starter, Dorothea – fear­ing that her son needs more nur­tur­ing than she alone can give – gath­ers up Julie and Abbie around her kitchen table and asks the pair to join her in rais­ing him.

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What fol­lows is the mean­der­ing process of Jamie spend­ing time with these women in the hope that he might evolve from boy to man. Everyone’s life unfolds. Char­ac­ters influ­ence one anoth­er. Per­son­al strug­gles are met with the atten­tion of those in close prox­im­i­ty. These peo­ple irri­tate one anoth­er, argue and then let it go and move on. They try to have whole-heart­ed fun, even when it goes against their cur­rent mood.

This is a film with strengths and weak­ness­es bound up in the same strag­gly ball. The lack of clear struc­ture affords fresh com­e­dy that appears to come out of nowhere, but it also leads to noth­ing moments in which char­ac­ter dynam­ics seem anti-climactic.

More than any­thing, 20^th Cen­tu­ry Women is a gift to the actors who are able to swim around in roomy char­ac­ters. Mills taps into new sides of Elle Fan­ning and Gre­ta Ger­wig. The for­mer is cast against milk-fed, flax­en-haired, inno­cent type as a reck­less­ly promis­cu­ous pur­suer of a dou­ble life. Mean­while Ger­wig, who so nat­u­ral­ly keeps things light, is sad­dled with a bur­den that cracks open a new type of vulnerability.

Jux­ta­posed against the dead weight of ill­ness, her cre­ative pur­suits amount to a defi­ant life force; hair dyed red to emu­late David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth and com­e­dy mus­cles fine-tuned to a seri­ous pitch as she edu­cates Jamie about cli­toral stim­u­la­tion via weighty fem­i­nist tones.

Matri­arch of the film, Dorothea, is a muzzi­er propo­si­tion. She has defin­ing habits (smok­ing, writ­ing down the stocks, laser-focus on Jamie) but it’s hard­er to describe her qual­i­ties. Ben­ing blows bohemi­an char­ac­ter mate­r­i­al up as ful­ly as pos­si­ble, mak­ing for a colour­ful out­line rather than a sub­stan­tial pres­ence. A gen­er­ous mind would call her elu­sive­ness an in-built com­po­nent of a mother’s mys­tery. A spec­u­la­tive mind would call it Mills’ rev­er­ence for repli­cat­ing all that remained unknown about his real mother.

The above is con­jec­ture, but fideli­ty to life events tru­ly intrudes on the free­wheel­ing atmos­phere in the form of syn­opses reduc­ing the women’s futures to a few lines. It feels like 20^th Cen­tu­ry Women is one draft away from a bal­ance between the source mate­r­i­al and the fictional.