20th Century Women review: Oscar nominee Annette Bening delivers a fierce, eccentric performance

Mike Mills, 119 mins, starring: Annette Bening, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup

You won’t see any other film this year that tries as hard to get under the skin of its characters as Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women. That’s both its glory and what makes it sometimes such a trial. All of the main protagonists here spend as much time analysing their lives as they do living them. They take self-consciousness to an extreme level.

The time scale is intriguing, being primarily set in Santa Barbara in the late 1970s, but with frequent glances back in time – and quite a few flashes ahead into the future too. The central character is Dorothea Fields (Annette Bening), a chain-smoking, 50-something single mom and career woman. She was born in the 1920s and raised in the Depression years. Mills throws in montages of photographs to evoke the era she grew up in – and to justify the title of the movie.

Dorothea wanted to become a pilot but the war finished before she could achieve her ambition. She is now a draughtswoman, bringing up her precocious 15-year-old son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann). We learn next to nothing about the boy’s father, from whom she is long since separated.

Bening plays Dorothea in a way that evokes memories of Katherine Hepburn in screwball comedies. She is fiercely independent and fiercely eccentric. Nothing fazes her. If her car suddenly catches fire, she’ll watch it burn with a mixture of mild curiosity and slight annoyance but will quickly find other, more important matters to attend to.

A more conventional director would have told the story from the position of the boy, looking back many years later at the women who helped raise him. That isn’t Mills' approach at all. He offers us as many different perspectives as there are characters.

The two other women in Jamie’s life are the lodger Abbie (Greta Gerwig), an artist and punk enthusiast who bases her appearance on that of David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth, and Julie (Elle Fanning), the sylph-like but subversive teenager on whom he has a mad crush. Another influence on the boy is the improbably good-looking hippy handyman William (Billy Crudup). At times, the film takes all of their points of view.

Any experience that these characters endure is pored over exhaustively both by themselves and by everybody else. It’s as if they’re all anthropologists and their subjects are themselves. If Jamie plays truant from school, having forged her signature, Dorothea will be more fascinated by his ingenuity than angry at him. “Please excuse Jamie from school this morning, he was doing volunteer work for the Sandinistas” is one of one of his more outlandish excuses.

Having given birth to Jamie, Dorothea is fascinated to see how life turns out for him and treats him as if he is her pet project. “Having your heart broken is a tremendous way to learn about the world,” she declares at one stage, oblivious to just how uncaring she sounds.

There is something comic in the way that everyone here looks for meaning in events or discussions that appear random and trivial in themselves. Little is spontaneous in their lives. When Jamie tries to make it clear to Julie that he is madly in love with her, she’ll parry his words by telling him that he is not exactly in love with her but with his “version” of her, which is something completely different. Abbie loves punk but she talks about it in such a detached and academic way that she risks stripping away the rebelliousness in the music.

Mills generates plenty of comedy from Jamie’s brushes with the adult world. At times, the 15-year-old seems very worldly – but then we realise that even if he does read Susan Sontag, he is just a kid at high school. In one comic set-piece, he gets into a scrap with a boy who has been boasting about his sexual exploits after asking the boy what he knows about clitoral stimulation. Newcomer Lucas Jade Zumann plays Jamie with an appealing earnestness, which makes him all the more comic.

There isn’t much in the way of action but, every so often, Mills will include graceful, dreamy sequences of Jamie skateboarding down a long and seemingly endless road. He also borrows footage of frenzied commuters and shoppers rushing around like ants from Geoffrey Reggio’s famous experimental movie Koyaanisqatsi.

Mills hints that the confusion felt by the characters is shared by the country as a whole. At one key moment, the members of the household crowd around the television set to listen to a strangely introspective and fatalistic speech from President Jimmy Carter in the summer of 1979 talking about a “longing for meaning” that all Americans are feeling in an era of oil shortages, uncertainty, and of mindless mass consumption.

The irony at the heart of the film is that, for all their navel-gazing and angst, the characters here seem happy enough. They’re living in sunny California in a close-knit home. They’re healthy (the smoking and drug taking notwithstanding) and relatively affluent.

This isn’t one of those coming of age yarns in which the young hero learns transformative lessons about life, love, and the cruelty of the adult world. Its structure is episodic. Even so, Mills is able to fill the film with a sense of yearning and of loss. We’re always aware that we’re looking in at moments in these characters’ lives which happened long ago.

Typically, though, even at its most nostalgic, 20th Century Women never loses its ironic humour or its habit of questioning and analysing everyone’s behaviour. The result is a film that, like its main protagonists, is perceptive, affecting but often exasperating too.