"20th Century Women" - Film Review
Director Mike Mills has described 20th Century Women as a love letter to his childhood set in a sleepy Santa Barbara of 1979. Dorothea (Annette Bening) runs a boarding house and lives with her son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zimmerman), Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a photographer, and William (Billy Crudup), an auto mechanic. Always hanging around the house is Julie (Elle Fanning), a good friend of Jamie. Dorothea is a single mother and enlists the help of Julie and Abbie to teach Jamie how to be a good man.
Mills’ films have a gentleness, paying special attention to the life experiences and relationships that make people who they are. The actors were given books, movies, and music loved by the real-life people from Mills’ life that their characters were inspired by. They used these artifacts to gain a deeper understanding of them. All of the characters have a sense of kindness and caring about them, especially Jamie. He takes Abbie’s feminist literature to heart and puts so much effort into trying to be good that he gets into a fight with several boys at the skate park over the way they talk about girls. His effort to understand and feel protective of people who are different from him is an admirable quality for someone of any age.
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A series of snapshot flashbacks and flashforwards for each of the characters plays throughout the film. We see Abbie in New York in the past and Abbie as a mother in the future. We learn where her pink hair came from, the details of her struggles with cancer, and if she ever has the opportunity to leave Santa Barbara for good. There are also quite a few montages of the state of the world at various times in the characters’ lives. “They don’t know this is the end of punk. They don’t know that Reagan’s coming,” is one of Dorothea’s voiceovers. These snippets of hindsight and foresight give the viewer context and add richness and depth to the characters. The film feels like the way we talk about the lives of our own friends and family. We learn about things both large and small that happen to them, and we learn how those events shape the characters and contribute to making each one a beautiful, unique person.
At its core, 20th Century Women is about the heartache that is almost inevitable between parents and children. Dorothea sums it up best when she says, “You get to see him out in the world as a person. I never will.” It’s a sad sentiment. Parents put so much time, effort, love, and money, so much of themselves, into raising a child they will never get to know as a complete human being. Similarly, children will never be able to understand the totality of who their parents were before they were parents. 20th Century Women encapsulates the beautiful way parents and children love each other, but may never fully understand one another.
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