Mulheres do Século 20

"Guys aren't supposed to look like they're thinking about what they look like." Julie (Elle Fanning)

No they're not, but in Mike Mills' 20th Century Women, some rules don't apply, and the young man, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), is well on his way to come of age in a most unusual household. It's 1979, before the Internet and Reagan and after the Punk rage. In other words, it's a time of cultural and personal transition.

No one is more responsible for this cultural migration in the Fields family than Dorothea (Annette Bening), a middle-aged matriarch with wit and lungs that will, in 20 years, surrender to the assault of her incessant smoking (her voice-over narration tells us so). Dorothea has the calm, contemplative, accepting nature to guide her two children, Jamie and Abbie (Greta Gerwig), into a responsible adulthood prefaced by sexual exploration and establishment defiance.

Although I rarely comment on acting, I must single out Bening for a performance of rich nuance, eschewing the theatrics of Oscar baiting to give us a character with immense affection and uncertainty, just like many of us, I suspect. Her low-key but powerful interpretation should get an Oscar nod.

While the examination of teen sexuality in flux is well described, so too is Dorothea's odyssey from a broken marriage to a Zen-like acceptance. As in the iconic Seinfeld world, nothing seems to be happening. However beneath that middle-class ambiance lie hearts struggling with their own shifting shapes under the watchful eye of family.

20th Century Women is all about the overwhelming part family plays in human development, not in grandly dramatic exercises but in the small notes like sitting in bed chatting or going with mother to a nightclub. As the credit sequence will tell you, life turns out fairly well despite the uncertainties of daily vicissitudes documented so distinctly here.

Greetings again from the darkness. Writer/director Mike Mills has found a niche, and a form of therapy, by exploring and exposing his life in a most public manner … on the silver screen. Beginners (2010) brought us the story of his father's (an Oscar winner for Christopher Plummer) late life pronouncement of homosexuality. This time, Mr. Mills turns his lens and his pen towards his mother, and he seems to understand her much better in retrospect than in the summer of 1979 when the film is set.

This can be viewed as the story of three women, masked as a coming-of-age story for a teenage boy. Annette Bening stars as Dorothea, a chain-smoking single mother in her mid-50's who seems to have surrendered to her own sadness and loneliness, while simultaneously trying to make sense of a changing world. One of her tenants is Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a photographer and NYC punk scene drop-out, who is now battling cervical cancer. The third female is the seemingly always present Julie (Elle Fanning), a sexually promiscuous and borderline depressive 18 year old who values the platonic friendship she has with Dorothea's 15 year old son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zuman).

Factor in another tenant in the form of laid-back handyman and former hippie William (Billy Crudup), and we have a makeshift family in a communal setting that seems almost normal for 1979 Santa Barbara. Dorothea enlists the other two women to show Jamie their lives – the intent being to influence his growth in ways an older mother can't. Of course, Jamie is at the age where exploring life isn't necessarily best served by tagging along on a trip to the gynecologist with Abbie or having no-touch sleepovers with Julie.

Ms. Bening finds her groove as the story progresses and we feel her struggling to connect to each of the characters. When William plays a Black Flag song, her reaction is priceless: "They know they're not good, right?" She doesn't mean it as a put down, but rather her attempt to understand why her son is drawn to this. An even more emotionally naked moment occurs when Jamie is reading a passage from "The Feminine Mystique" to his mother. It's a passage that captures what he thinks of her, as well as what she thinks of herself … a mostly invisible woman finding it difficult to be a parent while also maintaining a self.

Mills is not one to be nostalgic or glorify the past. His brilliant writing includes lines like "Wondering if you are happy is a great short cut to being depressed." The movie can be slow moving at times, but it's the best I've seen in awhile at expressing what makes us tick. The film is what Running with Scissors should have been. Real people are sometimes interesting, sometimes boring, and sometimes annoying. Each of the characters here are all of the above (just like you and me).

The scene feels remarkably familiar – Dorothea (Bening), the matron and saint of a Santa Barbara household circa 1979 leans in on her son Jamie (Zumann) listening to "Fairytale in the Supermarket" by The Raincoats. "They know they sound terrible right?" she says. Abbie (Gerwig), Dorothea's avant-garde lodger interjects; "yeah, but it's like they don't care. They got all this feeling but don't have the tools they need to express it…it all comes out as passion." Dorothea fixates on Abbie's intonation, like listening to language she's only now grasping. She gets it...but then she doesn't.

Much like Abbie's defense of The Raincoats, Dorothea believes she has all the passion to be a proper mother, but she lacks the right tools to support a son who is growing older with each passing moment. She decides to enlist the help of two young women; Julie, Jamie's best friend and crush and Abbie a free spirit who was recently treated for cervical cancer. The only other man in the picture is William (Crudup) a well-meaning former hippie with a gift for mechanics and a passion for pottery. Between them all, the stalwart Dorothea hopes to quietly guide her son through his formative years which pit her depression era approach, to Jamie's recession era resentments. "Don't you need a man to raise another man?" asks Julie. "No I don't think you do." 20th Century Women starts with competing voice-overs and uses a collage approach to convey the surfaces of each character's inner life. The collages are stuffed to the brim with stills of 1930's gloom and 1960's turbulence all set to audio of proto-punk, Jimmy Carter's Malaise Speech and "As Life Goes By" from Casablanca (1942). It's an awkward mix; one that creates an echo chamber of sorts.

That subtle discordance of people talking at and not to each other, runs through the first half of the film. Jamie's coming-of-age story, a volatile mix of stubborn familial resentment and unrequited love clobbers together with Dorothea's own midlife crisis. "I had Jamie when I was 40." Dorothea says; a fact that can help explain Dorothea's free-range parenting approach, but also helps explain why Jamie's sharp insights cut so deep. For a while there it always seems like its Jamie versus Dorothea, pulled apart by an ever widening generational gap.

Then, like responding to the blessing of a wartime parlay, the factions in this film begin to center and calm. It is during this truce that the film begins to really take off, presenting its characters with vibrancy and humanity while flying through a more nuanced story arc. Almost independently both Jamie and Dorothea learn their goals are one in the same and the differences they have are little compared to their mutual respect for time which presents itself in rainbow tinged tracking shots and subtle fast-forwards.

And at the center of 20th Century Women lies the affable Annette Bening who suitably captures the zeitgeist of a generation no longer with us. While most might pigeonhole Dorothea as a madcap eccentric or worse a passive pushover, Bening wisely lets the character's inner strength shine through. Dorothea is unabashedly a one of a kind lady. She invites strangers to dinner, invites herself to punk clubs, leaves early, and then comes back days later alone. She verves uncomfortably with post-sexual revolution mores yet she quietly takes frank conversations about menstruation in stride. She does all this because she knows that with every encounter, every meeting, every stranger there's a chance for exchange.

Of course 20th Century Women is not without its problems. While Bening, Gerwig and Fanning all do wonders in their roles, Zumann fails to endear the young Jamie to the audience in any meaningful way. Part of it is due to the part as it is written. The film is loosely based on the life of director Mike Mills thus Jamie at times feels more like an avatar than a real teenager. Additionally it's ironic that despite constant paraphrasing of feminist literature, 20th Century Women would struggle to pass the Bechdel Test. Our three women characters orbit Jamie's life and analyze his actions and motives like he's the center of their universe.

Yet, while the film uses the wider Women's Liberation movement as window dressing, allowing the external conflicts of the film to melt away to reveal honest internal pain was a stroke of genius. Genius enough to maybe be interpreted as a meta-text on standard storytelling practices being a form of patriarchal oppression. That however is a discussion for another day. 20th Century Women is an artfully rendered film with plenty to say about the passage of time, the commonality between the generation gaps and the unifying love of mother and son.

Just like the central character in this film, I was born in 1964. Just like him, I was 15 in 1979. My mother was only two years older than his mother. So, you'd think I could relate to this film. But I couldn't, really.

Maybe that is because I didn't grow up in a bohemian single parent household in Santa Barbara. Life for 15 year old Jamie was different than it was from me. I had two parents, but I didn't have a skateboard.

Yes, I can remember Jimmy Carter being president. But I didn't see his impressive and remarkably modern 'Crisis of Confidence'-speech, which is an important feature in one of the scenes of this film. There's only one thing which caused somewhat nostalgic emotions: making mix tapes. Yes, I did that too.

'20th Century Women', which is essentially about a mother raising a son, has nice scenes. I really liked the explanation about punk rock music to the 55 year old mother: she complains about the lack of beauty, but exactly that is the strength of it. There are many such scenes, with small but meaningful events, telling a lot about how life was in the seventies.

But the story itself didn't captivate me. Jamie's mother thinks she can't raise Jamie on her own, so she involves his best friend (a girl) and a photographer who rents a room in the house (also a girl). They teach him lots of things about sex, music, seducing women, and life in general. All characters are in a way in search of there own destiny. So, a lot of soul searching is going on. Anyway, the film contains one of the best one-liners I've heard in years: 'Wondering if you're happy is a great shortcut to just being depressed'.

I understand the rage of many other US reviewers because this movie is so far from usual Hollywood clichés that it does not even look like an US movie! It seems an European movie. Bergman, Fellini and stuff... It is NOT boring. It has its pace and it is exacly what it has to be. I identified myself at different levels. I was born in 1958, just like the main actress (great performance). And like Dorothea I had a daugther when I was in my 40s (she now is 15, like Jamie, Dorothea's son) and I don't know how to talk to her, I don't like much of the music she likes and so on. I was a teenager in the 70s, so I identified with Jamie, great character: I wish I had one thousandth of his self-consciousness when I was his age!

This movie was oxygen for suffocating US major's movies, after sequels and remakes and CGI shows finally something to think about.