BEFORE: We're going back to Atlantic City for a couple days, but not leaving until tomorrow (the Sunday-to-Tuesday hotel rates are cheaper, there's a travel tip for you) so I can squeeze in two more films before I have to take a day off.
I haven't seen this film airing on cable, maybe it did and I missed it - but I became aware of it because the film company sent out screeners to Academy members, which I guess worked because it did receive a nomination for Best Original Screenplay for 2016. No other nominations, but that did put it on my list - it's available on iTunes for 99 cents and Amazon Prime for $1.99, but I can watch it for free if I borrow the screener.
Billy Crudup carries over from "The Stanford Prison Experiment".
THE PLOT: The story of a teenage boy, his mother, and two other women who help raise him among the love and freedom of Southern California of 1979.
AFTER: This ties together several of the themes that have been coalescing this week - a teen boy coming of age and learning about relationships with women ("The Wackness"), plus there's the setting in California in the 1970's (like "The Stanford Prison Experiment") and then there's, umm, lots of home improvement going on, like in "House of Sand and Fog". OK, maybe that last one's a bit of a stretch. Maybe it's more like a "start of summer" theme, the character in "The Wackness" graduated and started his summer job, the students at Stanford enrolled in the prison experiment to make a little extra cash over the summer, and today we're hanging out on the beach in Santa Barbara and going to rock clubs. Can my own little summer road trip be right around the corner?
But it's only a quick 4 to 6 hour drive down the coast from Stanford to Santa Barbara - but we've moved ahead about 8 years to the end of the 1970's, the hotbed of the feminist movement and the height of punk music, when they still printed stock market prices in the newspaper, because there was no internet yet, and there were only three TV networks and radio stations hadn't all been bought by big media conglomerates.
Dorothea Fields is a woman sort of caught between two generations - she grew up during the Depression, so you'd expect her to be over-protective and incapable of being happy, but she gave birth later in life, at the age of 40, so her son was raised in the post-hippie era, where you were supposed to do whatever felt good and try to raise a son that was more sensitive to women's rights and needs. And the concept of a "helicopter mom" was still decades away - I think in the 1970's there was a strong reaction to the parenting techniques used in the 1950's, so heavy discipline was out and trying to connect with your kids and talking about their feelings was preferred. (Bad news, kids are going to get screwed up no matter what you do...)
So she enlists the help of a female photographer tenant who's recovering from cervical cancer, and also a local teen girl who climbs into her son's window at night to sleep with him (not to have sex, they just sleep together) to help raise her son on the right path, and also keep an eye on him, because if she did all the work herself, then she might seem like an overbearing parent. Her other tenant is a carpenter, mechanic and former hippie, who's helping to renovate her house. This man seems at first like he might be a good match for Dorothea, but she seems to prefer only short-term relationships with "safe" men, which could be a lingering effect from the break-up of her marriage.
Jamie, the son, goes to some rock clubs with the photographer, then goes on a road trip with Julie, the teen girl, and so he seems at the same time to be naive and innocent, but at the same time, he's also wise beyond his years. After confronting his mother about her "hands-off" style of parenting and sort of settling things with her, the characters somehow narrate their own futures, and we sort of learn everyone's final fates, which is a bit of an odd storytelling technique. Most people who smoke, for example, don't usually talk about the exact year they're going to die from lung cancer, this is probably the last thing that a smoker would want to talk about. And to hear people talk about themselves in the future tense with certainty rather than vagueness has a bit of a creepy feeling to it.
The director of this film is Mike Mills, who also directed "Beginners" - he is NOT the same Mike Mills who was in the band R.E.M. But, several soundtrack writing credits appear on his IMDB page, and those are mostly for songs recorded by R.E.M. Hmm, I'm betting that's a mistake, a clerical error made when people submit information to the IMDB (which I frequently do) and they forget to check whether there are two or more people with the same name. The IMDB uses as system of Roman numerals to distinguish between people who share common names, but it can still be confusing. So this director is Mike Mills (II) and the guy from R.E.M. is Mike Mills (I). I'm going to take some time out of my schedule today and try to straighten out this guy's credits - most of the credits for songs like "Everybody Hurts" are assigned to the correct Mike Mills, but the ones from TV episodes are linking to the wrong Mike Mills. I just need to file 23 data corrections forms, and in about an hour I might get someone at IMDB to take notice that there's some crossed wires in the data. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who can fix these things - probably because I'm the only person who takes the time to try. (I wonder if Mike Mills the filmmaker checks his own IMDB page and curses the fact that there are a lot of false credits there, for R.E.M. songs he didn't write...)
This story is so specific about the quirks of the characters that it's no surprise that it's based on real people - Mike Mills wrote the story mostly based on his mother and older sister. His other film "Beginners" was also largely autobiographical, and the two films sort of work as bookends, or companion pieces. While "20th Century Women" doesn't say exactly why his parents split up, that could be explained by the information seen in "Beginners". And the story in "Beginners" picks up five years after the death of the main character's mother, but this all takes place before that.
But for some reason when a director makes a film based on personal experiences during childhood, it can be hard to include some greater meaning to it all - I don't know why that is, perhaps self-reflection doesn't lead to many revelations that are universal, just specific ones. Or maybe they're holding back, I don't know - but I got the same feeling that I had after watching "The Wackness", that the movie goes around and around for a while, many things happen, but they just don't seem to coalesce and add up to make some greater point.
Also starring Annette Bening (last seen in "Captain Marvel"), Greta Gerwig (last seen in "Frances Ha"), Elle Fanning (last seen in "The Beguiled"), Lucas Jade Zumann, Alia Shawkat (last seen in "Whip It"), Darrell Britt-Gibson (last seen in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"), Thea Gill, Laura Wiggins, Nathalie Love, Waleed Zuaiter (last seen in "London Has Fallen"), Alison Elliott, Finn Roberts, Kirk Bovill (last seen in "Vice"), Gareth Williams (last seen in "Striking Distance"), John Billingsley and archive footage of Jimmy Carter (also last seen in "Vice"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Gerald Ford (last seen in "Kill the Messenger")
RATING: 5 out of 10 Talking Heads tracks
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