20th Century Women

20TH CENTURY WOMEN (Mike Mills, 2016)

Fifty-five-year-old Dorothea (Annette Bening) is raising her fifteen-year-old son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) on her own in 1979 Santa Barbara, but as he is coming of age in 20TH CENTURY WOMEN, she worries that she isn’t doing enough to help him become the man she would like him to become. The only man with any consistency in her life is William (Billy Crudup), a handyman renting a room in Dorothea’s large home. While he is the kind of masculine and thoughtful type she’d like Jamie to model, her son doesn’t really have anything to do with him.

Instead Dorothea turns to the two other female presences around Jamie on a daily basis. Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a photographer in her mid-twenties, is also a boarder and fulfills something of a cool older sister role. Seventeen-year-old Julie (Elle Fanning) is Jamie’s closest friend. She often sneaks into his room late at night to talk and sleep by his side. Although Jamie wishes they were romantically and physically involved, Julie insists that their closeness is strictly friendship. Jamie listens closely to the guidance of these women, hoping in part that taking their advice will help him develop a closer relationship with his mother.

The communal atmosphere in Dorothea’s house extends to the perspectives the film collects. 20TH CENTURY WOMEN unspools like a memoir with multiple authors, as the most central characters contribute voiceovers about the situation at this specific point in time and what the future holds for them. Dorothea and Jamie are the nucleus, but those orbiting them for this fleeting moment adopt a primary role from time to time. Writer-director Mike Mills builds the fluctuating dynamic by being deliberate in revealing the protagonists’ connections, which often aren’t what they might appear to be on first glance.

Mills jettisons some of the affectations that marked his previous film, BEGINNERS, resulting in a looser tone that rides the wave these characters have caught. Although he shares how things will turn out for those in the household, there’s no sense of grand design in getting them there. 20TH CENTURY WOMEN takes a snapshot of a pivotal time but not one with an accompanying a map to follow. All of the characters share a rudderless quality as they live through a transition they might sense but are impotent to steer through.

Despite the stylistic flourishes that might stake a directorial voice, 20TH CENTURY WOMEN is rooted in the performances. As a first-time mother at 40 and a child of the Depression who feels attracted and resistant to a more freewheeling life, Dorothea straddles the generational line. She wants to understand the appeal of Black Flag but is more partial to the more tuneful songs of Talking Heads. Bening displays Dorothea’s struggle to integrate open-minded and more rigid parenting as loving and present yet emotionally cool and inexplicably distant. It’s a hard balance to strike but one that shows why Jamie searches for a tighter bond with his mother. Zumann plays Jamie with a sponge-like quality that is endearing rather than needy. Fanning finds the perilousness of the idealized, self-possessed girl who is racked with her own neuroses. Gerwig inhabits the restlessness of not yet living how you envisioned adulthood. Crudup exudes the nature of a blue collar sage, yet like everyone else, William is merely drifting. For as much uncertainty and tension they face, Mills uses the voiceovers, with their future knowledge, to reassure that it’s OK if we can’t plot every step through the world.

Grade: B

Somewhere

SOMEWHERE (Sofia Coppola, 2010)

Holed up in the famous West Hollywood hotel Chateau Marmont, movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) floats through his days with an abundant supply of cigarettes, alcohol, and women wanting to sleep with him. Occasionally work interrupts his unhurried daily routine, but posing for publicity photos, fielding inane interviews questions, and sitting for a prosthetic mask fitting aren’t the most demanding or energizing tasks.

Johnny is in a rut, and the circumstances encourage him to stay in it. He’s acquired enough fame and money that he can have whatever he wants. By all appearances he doesn’t get much pleasure out of his good fortune, but there could be worse problems to have.

One day his willowy eleven-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) is dropped off at his door. When her mother will return for her is uncertain. Johnny isn’t an uninterested father, but the impression is given that he doesn’t play the role of parent on a regular basis. As he and Cleo hang out, the emptiness in his life becomes more apparent to him.

SOMEWHERE writer-director Sofia Coppola’s body of work explores lives in suspended isolation. This marks her third consecutive film about privileged people living in gilded cages. So it’s fitting that SOMEWHERE opens in the desert with Johnny driving his sports car in circles. The image is an obvious one, yet it’s still an effective and efficient way of conveying the existential crisis nagging the protagonist. Whether it’s the career or race track, Johnny has the means and the horsepower at his service to venture off the courses he’s found himself on. Nevertheless, he can’t or won’t get out of the infinite loops.

Although the film throbs with dissatisfaction and longing for purpose, SOMEWHERE plays as a dryly funny meditation on being adrift in Hollywood. Coppola sympathizes with a movie star’s burdens while observing the absurdity of the profession. Johnny’s presence at the junket roundtable with foreign press seems almost unnecessary as they pepper him with stupid questions yet barely wait for his equally pointless answers. His photo shoot with a co-star puts him through the indignity of being propped up on a board to reach her height. Additionally, both of them have to smile their way through being in close proximity and fake enjoying one another’s company when she clearly resents how he treated her.

The peak of “I get paid for this?” ridiculousness comes as Johnny must sit still for forty minutes while he’s slathered with goop that he waits for it to harden into a mold of his head. The medium shot of him sitting there encased in it highlights the absurdity of it all.

Johnny’s connection with Cleo becomes his life raft and throws into sharp relief how he relates to the women around him. Almost without exception the women he encounters bend over backwards, literally and figuratively, to please him regardless of if he’s shown an interest in them. They don’t need him to be anything more than what they’ve seen on movie screens and in magazines. He doesn’t ask of them to be something beyond outlets for his sex drive.

Cleo’s presence doesn’t erase this behavior in himself or those offering themselves to him, but Johnny slowly awakens to the harmful example he may be setting for the girl who is counting on him to be more than a movie star. In a strong supporting performance, Fanning fills Cleo with unconditional affection for Johnny. It’s possible to understand how the innocence and love beaming from her could shake him out of his static life.

SOMEWHERE doesn’t really earn its ending. Whether it’s the screenplay’s small scale view of the character, Dorff’s limitations, or a combination of both, the resolution feels as though it’s been arrived at too quickly and easily. Regardless, SOMEWHERE finds Coppola mining similar territory and discovering new elements.

Grade: B+