20th Century Women (2016)

This is a movie where I think one of the things I will always remember most about it is that I first saw it on January 21st 2017, the day of the massive anti-Trump women's marches around the planet. It was indeed poignant counter programing for inauguration weekend, and it is easy for me to imagine that if Hillary had won the election, this being the first film she would have shown in the White House theater. 20th Century Women is to no surprise a very feminist movie. Though it may seem ironic that the film was written and directed by a man, it is something its creator thinks of as a "love letter" to the women who raised him. Says its auteur Mike Mills: "It felt like I was raised by my mom and sisters, so I was always appealing to women in the punk scene or women in my world. I always leaned to them to figure out my life as a straight white guy. So I wanted to make a movie about that."

Set in Santa Barbara, California, the film centers on a 15 year old boy named Jamie (a solid performance from newcomer Lucas Jade Zumann) and "the women who raised him" in the summer of 1979. This triumvirate consists of his independent single mother, a drafts woman named Dorothea (Annette Bening), Abbie, a newspaper photographer and aspiring artist who rents a room in Dorothea's turn of the century home, and Julie (Elle Fanning), Jamie's childhood friend and object of some frustrated desire. The main cast is rounded out by Billy Crudup as William, an auto mechanic and another of Dorothea's tenants, who is helping her slowly renovate the house in exchange for a reduced rent.

20th Century Women is a movie in which it could be said that not a lot happens, though in fact quite a bit actually does, though its not a strongly plot driven film, rather its about the social interactions between some very well drawn characters, portrayed in fine performances all around. While the sense of period nostalgia is present, though not overplayed, the film evokes a broader nostalgia towards the shaping women in ones life. The movie moves around via narration, a few flashback (and even forward) scenes, and period footage through the lives of its characters, filling in both the back story and future fates of its principles. In doing so the movie presents itself as memory, reminiscence of a brief period, a couple of months one summer, that continue to stand out in the lives of its characters as one of those treasured moments, a perfect time that seems a touchstone for both all the came before and all that would follow. It is a film that I found to be both surprisingly powerful, and sometimes surprisingly funny. 20th Century Women fires on all cylinders, it is far from a traditional commercial property, both passionate and reflective, and left me kind of melancholy, but in a good way. Sometimes a loosely focused, kind of ambiguous text, can say more then something precisely messaged. This film really does feel like a love letter. ****