Posted in: Movies, Review | Tagged: 20th century women, film, movies, reviews

'20th Century Women' Among The Best Coming Of Age Genre Films

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With 20th Century Women, indie film production house A24 continues their trend in recent years of delivering some really great films. Penned and directed by Mike Mills, Women is a coming of age story set in Santa Barbara, California towards the end of the 1970s. Dorothea (Annette Benning) is a hippie mom trying to raise her teenage son, James (Lucas Jade Zumann). Feeling that they are growing apart, she decides to recruit the women closest to him to help teach him about the world and about himself.

In many ways the action of the film has the feel of a stage play, with it revolving mostly around Dorothea's large home that she shares with James and two boarders. The main players around them are:

Abbie (Greta Gerwig) – A budding photographer and artist in her late 20s with a love for the punk music scene and struggling to cope with a battle with cancer and the impact it's had on her life.

William (Billy Crudup) – A middle aged ex-commune hippy who works on cars and acts as a handyman for Dorothea in exchange for lodging. He struggles with a lack of generational identity, having been born between eras, too young to have been part of the WWII era, but too old to be part of Generation X.

Julie (Elle Fanning) – Jamie's BFF and classmate who is sexually active, only not with him since he's the one that she actually cares about and doesn't want to cheapen it with sex but she still sneaks in the window almost every night to sleep alongside him.

During the course of the film, Jamie acts as a narrator of brief flashbacks for each character – helping to fill in the blanks about how they arrived on the scene and their internal motivations. Mills has successfully drawn fully fleshed out characters.  They don't have the feeling of being created just for the purpose of the timespan of the story, rather that have each lived lives bringing them here. They have the feeling of being people that Mills cared about, and in doing so manages to make the audience care as well.

Quite simply put, Women is probably one of the best examples of it's genre that we've had in a generation. Sure, Boyhood was a technical achievement, but Women is simply a better story and with stronger performances. Mills wrote the screenplay from his own experiences growing up being raised by his mother and sister, the dialogue and scenes are smartly written and come across as honest. As people are in real life, each of the characters in the film have flaws and are simply trying to make sense of their place in the world. Overall the story isn't so much about them fixing each other as it is about them helping each other learn to cope with the reality of the world. Most coming of age films has the central character learn their lesson and suddenly pivot into the next stage of their lives, which overlooks how such moments are rarely so clear-cut and immediate. Last year's Edge of 17 was a great comedic take on the genre, and Women is an even better taken on the dramatic front.

Benning and Gerwig both shine in their performances, which is no mean feat given that everyone delivers at the top of their game. Benning's Dorothea has remained single by choice, always having avoided getting into another long-term relationship after Jamie's father left. She struggles to understand the new world that her son is growing into – the music, the culture, she wants to be a part of it, but she also knows that she has in part missed her time. We have quiet moments of seeing her loneliness breaking through her veneer of contented home-life, it's heartbreaking but at the same we respect her strength.

The film touches on Abbie's feminism and her imparting of it to Jamie, but it doesn't come across as preachy or overbearing. The film doesn't answer every question for the audience, just as Jamie doesn't find every answer his adolescent-male mind is seeking. Mills has a confidence in his filmmaking that is refreshing, not everything is spelled out or wrapped up in perfect bows. In one scene where Dorothea and William are flirting and she asks him about his dalliance with Abbie and he replies with "That's nothing serious." She asks, "why do it then?" There is no reply, the scene ends and we move on. As with real-life relationships, sometimes there aren't quip answers. It takes confidence to handle scenes that way, and he handles it masterfully.

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