It’s 1979 in Santa Barbara, California. Dorothea (Annette Bening) and her son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) look onto a supermarket parking lot to see fire engulf their junker of a car. Afterwards, Dorothea invites the firemen to a party at her house. She doesn’t act like other mothers, or even other people. She chain smokes and she has a few random souls sharing the house with her and Jamie, but that’s only part of what’s striking about her. Dorothea is one of the few people who know in their gut that the world is chaotic, yet she tries to bring order to it. Not a phony order; she doesn’t join the PTA or a country club or a political party; she tries to reason things through, one situation at a time.
She’s nervy and curious. She challenges Jamie when he does stupid kid stuff, and she won’t let him off the hook when he gives equally dumb explanations. At the same time, she flinches when he pins her down. She evades the issues of her smoking or why she won’t attach to any of the men she attracts.
The last film from director and writer Mike Mills was Beginnings in 2010. It was based on his father who after the death of his wife announces he’s gay. This new movie is about Mills’s mother, and it makes you see that in actuality Mills probably lived through a lot of tumult.
But the movie gives more of an unruly portrait of this character than an autobiography. It’s built on layers of personal monologues, from Dorothea, from Jamie, and from Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a young punkish woman who lives in the house. Everyone hopes Abbie has now got over a case of cervical cancer, caused by the drug DES which her mother took during pregnancy. There’s also some insight from Julie (Elle Fanning), who’s 16, just two years older than Jamie, and often climbs up the side of the house and into Jamie’s window to sleep with him. They don’t have sex, which frustrates Jamie and angers Abbie who thinks Julie is manipulative.
And there’s William (Billy Crudup), a 40-something mechanic who slowly renovates the house, and in the metaphorical sense, this is a house undergoing constant renovation.
The workings of the people make a fascinating two hours. For a while, the film looks uncentered; there’s a lot of culture and personality to sort out, that only comes into focus slowly. There’s punk music experienced by a woman born in the 1920s, whose response to a club outing is to retreat into the 20s crooner Rudy Valee. Dorothea was 40 when Jamie was born; she’s a single mother. She worries about raising Jamie to become a good man, and those thoughts are guided by her late ‘70s-style feminism. So she asks the two young women to help, which dumbfounds them, and Jamie winds up with a stack of feminist books to read – like Our Bodies, Our Selves – for which he’s surely too young, and it gets him into a fight with another kid over the idea of clitoral stimulation.
But Dorothea is a permissive, tolerant mother, to say the least. Jamie goes off to a concert in LA, unannounced; he and Julie run away, temporarily at least, yet Dorothea stays patient and helpful. She’s got plenty of flaws, but the movie shows a woman who is present like very few characters you’ll ever encounter.
All this comes in a package that’s so brightly colored it can look like a dish of M and Ms. There’s yellow and black all over the film, red shirts and purple skirts, overwhelming green. 20th Century Women does not take place in a shy or bashful world. Things don’t get muted in earth tones or hidden in understated nooks and crannies. It’s all right out there waiting to be grabbed, held, tossed around and maybe even understood. And for all their oddities and foibles, these 20th century women take it on.
