I will not pretend to be unbiased. I only saw this one because I thought it might annoy me in some interesting way. I’m weird like that. Honestly making fun of this kind of movie is the type of thing that keeps Benevolent Movie Critic in business! Yet even I was a little shocked by the particular interesting annoyances offered by 20th Century Women, which is basically like “Brighton Beach Memoirs” written by Neil Simon’s edgy nephew (director Mike Mills is not actually related to Neil Simon as far I know). Yet let’s see…teenage male narrator? Check! Brooding crush object? Check?(though treated more respectfully than her Simon counterpart) Eccentric “Aunt” figure with a complicated love life? Check( that one’s actually “Lost in Yonkers” but you get the idea) and first and foremost, though never foremost enough, aging mother with lost repressed dreams? CHEEEECK! Just replace Brooklyn-ey dinner table yelling about spaghetti with ketchup with hushed California dinner table menstruation chat and you’re good to go! Looking deeper into the comparison Mills’s attitude towards his mother is not all that different from Neil Simons’s attitude towards his in “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “Broadway Bound”. She’s an (intentionally or not) self sacrificing left over of the old world who is a little bit left behind by the new one. Thankfully though Mills’s mother figure is given a little more freedom and future than Simon’s. Nonetheless Mills continues the tradition of simultnauously revering and patronizing his late parental inspiration.

On another note I’ve often faced a conundrum. Benevolent Movie Critic loves movies. And Benevolent Movie Critic loves 70’s rock n roll. Yet Benevolent Movie Critics hates most movies about 70s rock n roll. ( A YouTube commenter brought up the similarities between this films trailer and “Almost famous.”) The most understandable reason is that they tend to be not so much about what the music was about but rather middle aged men nostalgically pining for the era of their youth, ignoring the people who were hurt(e.g.Women.) Read Peter Bradshaw’s “Almost Famous” take down for more deets. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2001/feb/09/1. Sample “what’s the point of sentimentally excising the dark side of rock when it’s precisely the filth and sleaze that many of his target audience will be perversely sentimental about?”  Exceptions include “We are the Best!!” which captures punk beautifully and “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” which unlike this movie doesn’t sugar coat the 1970s. 20CW joins the line of 70s movies that treat the upcoming 80s like the apocalypse. Richard Linklater of all people went as far as to state in a recent interview that racism wasn’t around in the late 70s and only returned in the 80s https://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/everybody-wants-some-richard-linklater?utm_term=.vxjlvGyD5#.sdK0ZjL9E (it’s like Linklater was built in a lab to annoy me.)

Annette Benning, elegant as ever but a bit hobbled by the movie’s refusal to stick with her character, is Dorthea, mother of Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) our dull as ditchwater center. Greta Gerwig (who has somehow gone from the modern equivalent of an Andy Warhol personality to almost a character actress) is Abbie, a punk rock loving artist with cervical cancer, who rents a room in the house. She’s fun and sweet, but hardly the raging free spirit the movie seems us to want to think she is. Its difficult to think of anything she does that wild and crazy. She gets drunk once and breaks a chair. Ooooooh. There’s also the issue that Gerwig is a bit old to play a 24 year old (but Hollywood is Hollywood and women take good roles where they can get them.) Nonetheless she’s the funnest of three titular women to be around. Next is troubled Julie, a friend of Jamie’s whom he is enamored with, who comes over to recive emotional support in between depressing hijinks of her own (this is the most obviously straight male aspect of a very straight male movie).

Dorothea,the reason you are here, is full of contradictions. Yet it’s difficult to tell if these are good or bad contradictions in the cinematic sense. On one hand Dorothea lets Jamie skip school whenever he wants to. On the other hand she is horrified at his bad judgment when he is injured in a dangerous game with some other kids. She is grossed out by sexual terms one moment but seems unbothered by explicit sex talk at the family dinner table the next (this talk is brought up by in house hottie handyman played by Billy Crudup, the real life betrayer of Mary Louise Parker.) Yes I know that Dorethea is based on Mills’s real life mother, but as a character Dorethea is all tell and no show. We keep getting narration telling us about her, and she keeps telling us about her (which is contrary to Mills’s insistence on and off screen that Dorothea never tells people about herself) yet going by what she actually does in the movie it’s hard to get any sort of rewarding grasp on her besides “Annette Benning sure is lovely and beatific!”(yes, she is but we knew that already.)

Critics(Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers) have pointed out “20th Century Women” is a movie about punk rock, which should be enough pandering for my liking. Certainly every character in the film seems to share my musical taste evidenced by their t shirts. Yet it ignores the actual essence of punk. Characters talk lovingly about “anger” yet the only “anger” we see on screen is filmed jokingly with incongruous music playing over it(the previously mentioned chair breaking.) Plus unlike the home in “the Diary of a Teenage Girl” Jamie’s house is actually a pretty conventional and nice place to grow up. Sure his mom has eccentric borders but so did Kit the American Girl Doll’s.  And don’t even get me started on the feminism. Let’s just say regardless of the title the movie only just passes the Bechdel test and the depths of its insights are “periods exist” “teenage girls are moody” “women are sad when they get all old and everybody’s mean to them.”(the movie’s opinions not mine).Melissa Anderson pointed out similar things in her review in the Village Voice. Honestly If you want feminist insights from a movie this year you’d be better served by “the Love Witch”, “Certain Women” or “Toni Erdmann”, all of which have female directors, not that such a thing is necessary to create a portrait of womanhood as evidenced by “Christine” directed by Antonio Campos, also a good choice.

Back to the plot. Over the course of the movie Jamie chills with Julie(the most irritating parts of the movie as the movie can’t empathize with her much as it thinks it can), parties with Abbie (the most enjoyable as we actually get to see the punk scene) and tries to figure out who his mom really is (which probably should have been the whole movie). That’s about it. Many critics have pointed out this films plotlessness including “What the Flick”. It must be pointed out that for all my misgivings this is a far superior movie to Mills’s “Beginners” which was about Mills’s father’s death. Mostly because there is no time consuming love story between Euan McGregor and a beautiful actress many years his junior. Although much as I love Benning I will admit I was more interested in Mary Paige Keller’s brief portrayal of the same mother figure in that movie.Keller radiated a cold opaque  glamor neither Mills nor Benning seems willing to touch here. The movie wants her to be unreadable yet Benning is an exceptionally open actress and more here than usual (she’s over the “playing misogynistic charicactures of middle aged wives” stage of her career thank god)*. Dorothea is difficult to understand, but not in the way the movie wants her to be. Nonetheless there’s a lot to appreciate in the extent to which the movie loves both Benning and her character, so much that when, near the end of the movie an unexpected fact is dropped about Dorothea’s eventual future one can’t help shedding a tear.

“20th Century Women” has many admirable qualities. Mills rather beautifully films Santa Barbara and never resorts to making the movie look grainy to evoke the 70s (MAY THIS SET A TREND). Furthermore there are in fact three good-ish roles for women in this. However, the patronizing observance of them, (by a 15 year old boy no less) stops these roles for being great.  Melissa Anderson notes the fact that the women aren’t that important to the movie that bears their name. http://www.villagevoice.com/film/woman-power-serves-a-boy-in-mike-mills-s-late-seventies-remembrance-20th-century-women-9494228.  In the end we only see these women through the eyes of a young man. In that way it’s not all that different from every other movie.

*American Beauty is awful.