20th Century Women, the latest film by Thumbsucker director Mike Mills, finds intoxicating specificity in its time and location. The story takes place in 1979 and unfolds against the backdrop of sunny Santa Barbara, CA, a town best described as something between sleepy suburban sprawl and beachside mini-metropolis. The counterculture is on its last legs, clinging to a fractured punk rock scene that finds hardcore nihilists at odds with so-called “art fags.” (Good luck wearing a Talking Heads t-shirt around a Black Flag fan.) The film’s primary setting is an aged Victorian home in various stages of renovation and disrepair. On a TV in the living room, Jimmy Carter ushers in the Reagan years by accusing the American people of being soulless. The characters, each of whom are in various stages of emotional self-discovery, are as much woven into this tapestry as they are removed from it, and that’s because Mills, using unconventional methods of flashback and foreshadowing, also shows us where they’ve been, where they’re headed and, most crucially, where they’d prefer to be.
Rather than adhere to a conventional plot, 20th Century Women follows a string of anecdotal incidents that form a sort of emotional framework for both the characters and the audience. At the center of it all is 15-year-old Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), the son of 50-something divorcee Dorothea (Annette Benning), the matriarch of the house, which is also occupied by recovering hippie handyman William (Billy Crudup) and second-wave feminist photographer Abbie (Greta Gerwig). Then there’s Julie (Elle Fanning), Jamie’s slightly older best friend and unwilling object of affection, who sneaks into the house late at night after partying and hooking up with local guys. She likes to crawl into Jamie’s bed and cuddle up close, hoping their deep yet platonic companionship can soothe emotional wounds brought on by a dysfunctional family and painful self-doubt. His feelings, though, are floating toward the sexual and romantic, and their increasingly tortured connection illustrates the way complicated adult relationships aren’t restricted to the realm of adults.
Emotions bubble on the surface throughout the film, which, like Mills’ previous effort Beginners, is built largely on the director’s personal experiences. The characters have immediate and often exquisitely detailed personalities, most notably Dorothea, who beams with a kind of guarded generosity, obsesses over her stocks and is never more than 10 inches away from a pack of Salems. “She’s from the Depression,” Jamie often explains, as if it’s something like Mars, a distant world utterly unrelated to the here and now. This isn’t lost on Dorothea, who, despite thinking of herself as progressive, has a hard time relating to the era’s fluctuating leftist culture. She empathizes with and cares greatly for Julie and Abbie, and even recognizes an inherent kinship with them, but their differing ideas about female responsibility and the nature of womanhood are the most pronounced aspects of their relationship. That doesn’t stop her, however, on the day she asks them to help raise Jamie, from whom she’s becoming increasingly estranged. Now, his coming-of-age journey has as much to do with deciphering these three distinct voices as it does with deciphering his own.
Mills’ approach is often dreamy and impressionistic. Scenes tend to unfold like distant memories, complete with Sean Porter’s hazy cinematography, and they’re occasionally accompanied by pensive voiceover from the characters. Their words detail the past and future events of their lives, and Mills samples archival footage and assorted still images in order to fill in the gaps. The film isn’t nonlinear, exactly, but it does exist out of time. The various photos, newsreels and even the occasional clip from another movie seem to spring directly from the director’s mind, images that accompany his distant thoughts and emotions. Just like distant thoughts and emotions, the film has no organizational principal, no specific guideposts that point us one way or another. Watching the film feels like leafing through a vivid, transcendent memoir; personal experience is shaded with historical import. 20th Century Women is an evocative look back at a group of people and when they lived, how they lived, what music they listened to, who they slept with and what they did when they were hurt the most.
For all his emotional honesty, Mills does have a discouraging penchant for nostalgia, sentiment and obtuse storytelling devices. More than a few potentially powerful sequences, like the night Dorothea and William spend listening to the noisy punk music the kids find so appealing, succumb to his corny sensibilities. The half-built home where the characters reside is a pretty blunt and unimaginative metaphor for the makeshift family they’ve formed, and the dialogue often shares the same disaffected quirkiness of Jonathan Lethem and Dave Eggers at their most insufferable. Even the title is a dead giveaway to Mills’ subtext. Jamie, despite being the story’s nucleus, is often treated as a sounding board for Julie, Abbie and Dorothea’s conflicting feminist outlooks. The film approaches feminism with cogency and thoughtfulness, but it occasionally comes at the expense of the characters; sometimes they feel less human and more archetypal, which doesn’t fit Mills’ emotional inclinations. Subtlety isn’t his strong suit.
Where Mills most excels is in giving cinematic shape to the unique process of recollection. Human memory works in spurts and sputters, which is exactly how 20th Century Women unfolds. There’s no pattern to the way we reflect on our lives. Sometimes the smallest, most mundane events are remembered with vivid detail, while the specifics of a life-changing incident can be difficult to recall; times of regret and embarrassment are often easily remembered, while the happiest moments sometimes fade into obscurity. Mills aestheticizes this imperfect system and locates its unique beauty in traumatic doctor visits, awkward sex, underground Los Angeles music venues and not-so-impromptu trips up the coast. If these events don’t exactly result in a tidy resolution—indeed, the film doesn’t end as much as it simply slips away—it’s because life has no actual resolution. As long as someone remembers the tune, the music keeps playing.
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