20th Century Women (2016)

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Admirable film.

Absolutely the worst movie.

I loved this film. As a woman whose mom was born in 1927, I understand so much of the confusion between decades and lives lived. I loved writer/director Mike Mills execution throughout, but mostly I loved the casting and acting of every piece of this wonderful ensemble. Because I'm older, I especially appreciated Bening and Crudup. Crudup's William so reminded me of my cousin Elliot -- sensitive, 'artsy', but still manly and trying to chill and figure things out. So perfect! And Bening...I just love her more every time I see her. How she embodies each role she plays and exudes this new personality for us to see...wonderful stuff!However, the younger generation also embodied wonderful performances -- Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, and Lucas Jade Zumann were exquisite!Probably not a guy's film, but just what I needed to see today. Thanks, cast and crew!

I found this movie on Netflix streaming movies. I have been a fan of Bening's for a long time, her performances made movies like 'American President', 'American Beauty', and 'The Kids are All Right.' In this movie she is 55-yr-old Dorothea Fields, living in Southern California in 1979. She has a 15-yr-old son, Lucas Jade Zumann as Jamie, she is concerned that she may be too out of touch with the modern world to raise him adequately so she enlists the help to two women.One is Elle Fanning as 17-yr-old neighbor Julie, the other is 30- something Greta Gerwig as Abbie Porter, aspiring professional photography boarding with Dorothea and Lamie. Plus there is Billy Crudup as handyman William, working to renovate their old house, also boarding there.The movie is well-written and well-acted. We enjoyed it.

Annette Bening got snubbed for an Oscar nod for Mike Mills's "20th Century Women", playing a divorced mom running a boarding house in 1979 Santa Barbara. Much of the movie features the characters (the mom, her son, his friend, and some tenants) discussing their past, but also focuses on the women's liberation movement. Unlike many movies set in the era, there's no emphasis on the clothes or music of the era. This one is all about the characters' relationships. And rarely have we heard female sexuality discussed this openly in a movie from the US.Mike Mills previously directed "Beginners", about an elderly man who comes out as gay to his son. I've liked both his movies so far. Probably the most interesting scene is at the end when the characters discuss their future. It's also good that, despite the spate of terrible things that happened in 2016, there were a number of female-driven movies (20th Century Women, The Boss, Ghostbusters, Bad Moms). I recommend it, and I hope to see more movies like it.

American filmmaker Mike Mills' third feature film, 20th CENTURY WOMEN is a semi- autobiographical treatment thrives for encapsulating the zeitgeist of its time through the eyes of his alter ego Jamie (Zumann), a 15-year-older living in Santa Barbara in 1979, and those who are involved in his life at that stage, including his single mother Dorothea (Bening), Julie (Fanning), the girl-next-door he cottons to, and two tenants sharing the same roof with the mother-son pair: a free-wheeling cinematographer Abbie (Gerwig) and William (Crudup), an ex-hippie-turned- mechanic, that's the central quintet.Each character is given a magnanimous character arc to lay bare their problems and quirks, Dorothea is concerned with the communication blockage caused when Jamie reaching adolescence and asks both Julie and Abbie for help, to infuse their feminine wisdom to ease the process, but the mirror has two faces, in Jamie's book, it is her who has drifted away from him, emotionally speaking, her ingrained sadness and loneliness has hog-tied her from even attempting to seek a new lease on her life. Bening puts a defiant face to sort out a mother's indefatigable stamina conjoined with hapless frustration, whenever the camera leveling at her, she radiates with élan and candid, no matter how platitudinous her lines are, her masterclass delivery is the ballast of this snappy but also self-indulging reflection of an ineffectual Bidungsroman, interlaced with lengthy voice-over and token signs-of-the-times. As a patent feminist manifesto indicated by its name, Mills makes heavy plays of its female characters, Abbie, stricken by cervical cancer and runs the risk of forfeiting motherhood, is the most sympathetic character and a ginger Gerwig is perfectly cast, she is tasked with the "menstruation" oration, because of her time-tested screen persona: she can be radical, quirky, but simultaneously vulnerable and self-effacing, a quality so unique that often errs on the side of being typecast. Elle Fanning's Julie, on the other hand, tiptoes between adolescence and adulthood, dangles Jamie with her dalliance with others yet maintains a chaste relationship with him (he has been entrapped in the friends zone for too long), but that's what is part and parcel to be an impressionable young girl, especially a pretty one and those equally impressionable young boys need to respect that! From that viewpoint, we might find the film tends to be a tad didactic and patronizing since the story chiefly sets the main key on the more conventional "the kid is alright" arc of a cisgender boy, who has grown up in a household peopled with women who are much more interesting than him, even the undervalued William, who is not exactly a conventional father figure, but Crudup is in one of his most relaxed and unassuming forms, somewhat inward-looking but alternately exuberantly charming. While one might feel underwhelmed by its self-referential narrative and jarring by its often clunky dialogue, at the very least, the film has a congenial flair of communion among its main characters, and from the opening aerial shot introducing its locale to its eye-soothing vintage production, to the time-lapsed novelty of automobiles in motion, 20TH CENTURY WOMEN proves that it has enough ammo in the cartridge, but the shooter himself is not a dead-eye.