Mills is a hell of a writer. That was evident in his second feature, "Beginners," where Christopher Plummer gave an Oscar-winning performance as a father who came out of the closet at age 75. "Beginners" was about Mills' father; "20th Century Women" is about his mother. Together the films form bookend narratives of love, tribute and elegy. John Steinbeck wrote East of Eden, in part, for his two sons, to show them what his childhood had been like, what Salinas Valley was like back in the day, what their ancestors were like. It's a documentary-like approach to a personal history. Mills' films have a similar quality. They aren't acts of nostalgia filmed through a golden gauzy filter. They want to communicate something. Similar to "Beginners," Mills uses archival photographs and voiceover to express the connective tissue as well as the abyss between the present and the past. The future is present too. "20th Century Women" is narrated, for the most part, by Jamie, although all of the other characters contribute. They tell us who they are, where they came from, where they're going. This approach is like peeking at the last page of a novel.
"20th Century Women" takes place in Santa Barbara in 1979. Jimmy Carter looks exhausted on TV. Teenage girls smoke cigarettes and devour Judy Blume's "Forever." The new crazes are skateboarding and punk music. Dorothea had her son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) at the age of 40 and has raised him alone. Two tenants rent a couple of rooms in Dorothea's rambling fixer-upper house: Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a maroon-haired photographer recovering from cervical cancer, and William (Billy Crudup), a mechanic/potter/carpenter who still speaks hippie-speak ("energy," "earth mothers"), and is tolerant, aimless and helpful. Jamie's best friend from childhood, a ragingly depressed and promiscuous girl named Julie (Elle Fanning), is so unhappy at home she crawls through Jamie's window at night to sleep (platonically) with him on his mattress on the floor. Jamie, naturally, is in agonies of horniness about this situation.
In a panicked impulse, Dorothea senses that a single mother might not be "enough" to usher Jamie into this new phase in his life. She asks Abbie and Julie to help Jamie by sharing their lives with him. How this will help is not exactly clear, and Abbie and Julie are confused, but they give it a go. Over the course of the film, Abbie takes Jamie out to punk music clubs and gives Jamie hardcore feminist literature to read. He really takes to it, getting into a fight with a boy at school over "clitoral stimulation" which then leads to one of the funniest exchanges in the film when Jamie explains to Dorothea what the fight was about. (Bening has one of my favorite line readings of the year in that scene: "Okay. Jesus. Yeah.") Jamie is surrounded by eccentric, complicated women. Their bodies are confusing and erratic: Abbie's "incompetent" cervix, Julie's pregnancy scare, Dorothea's aging process. Jamie wants to understand and wants to be there for them. He tells his mother, "I want to be a good guy, you know?" He means it.
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