20th Century Women (15)

IT'S 1979 in sun-kissed California. Bohemian single mother Dorothea (Annette Bening) frets that her teenage son is lacking a male role model, and has a radical solution: to teach her son to be “a good man”, she turns to two young women.

The premise may be slight, yet this comedy slowly exerts a magical spell through dint of gorgeous writing, spot-on performances and beautifully evoked period. And while offering a sharp snapshot of late 1970s west-coast life, the film reflects on the social changes across a century in which human interaction would be slowly eroded by materialism, consumerism and the internet age.

It opens with a bang, literally, as Dorothea’s ancient Ford spectacularly ignites in a supermarket car park. No-one’s hurt, and the accident even allows this ebullient woman to invite the fire crew to an impromptu house party. But as the last physical remnant of her marriage is destroyed, it gets her thinking, and worrying about her son.

In truth, 15-year-old skateboarding Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) seems fairly grounded. His biggest dilemma is that he’d like the platonic friendship with best friend Julie (Elle Fanning) to be much more.

Nevertheless, Dorothea believes he needs guidance. The nearest man to hand is sweet-tempered lodger William (Billy Cudrup), who is helping to renovate her sprawling house in Santa Barbara. But he and the boy don’t really connect. And so Dorothea turns to the other lodger, Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a twenty-something punk photographer with a shock of crimson hair, and to Julie, only a couple of years older than Jamie yet far more worldly.

The boy isn’t enamoured with the amount of attention suddenly cast his way. But eventually Julie and Abbie start to exert an influence – albeit in ways that aren’t exactly what Dorothea intended.

Though writer and director Mike Mills isn’t prolific, his films invariably hit their mark. Thumbsucker, starring Tilda Swinton and Keanu Reeves, was a droll comedy about adolescence in which dysfunctional adults made the teen in question seem well-adjusted. Ewan McGregor starred in the lovely Beginners, as a man struggling with the death of his father.

Mills does character, family and bittersweet comedy very well indeed. Nothing much happens here in terms of plot, yet we come away with a deep sense of individuals wrestling with universal issues – how to be a better parent, the inability to commit or find a life partner, the passing of time, the state of the world – profound subjects handled with such lightness and humour that we chuckle, a lot, as we ponder.

The director uses neat little devices to further his themes. One is to introduce montages of archive images from each character’s birth year (Dorothea’s during the Depression, Abbie’s in 1955, Jamie’s in 1964) with potted narrations of their lives, while also casting ahead to the years beyond the action of the film, creating a touching weave across past, present and future.

Another, inspired moment sees the group listen to Jimmy Carter’s famous “crisis of conscience” speech on TV, in which he mourned America’s growing worship of self-indulgence and consumption. The president’s rhetoric imbues the film itself with a power and pathos; when Dorothea muses that, “The car was not always old. It just got that way, all of a sudden,” she’s speaking not just of her own life, but of a certain loss of innocence for America.

The heart of the film is occupied by Bening’s warm, eccentric, very funny and emotionally nuanced performance. And a killer soundtrack (Talking Heads, The Clash, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bowie, The Buzzcocks) provides its appealing punk energy.

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