Introduction - 20th Century Women from 2016 should have won Annette Bening an Oscar for her shining multi dimensional portrait of a single mum, all at sea, bringing up her son.
Film: 20th Century Women
Year: 2016
Director: Mike Mills
Poster
Source
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Why this film
The movie set in 1970's Southern California, is part based on director, Mike Mills' childhood. He is a realist film maker - his technique for this movie, combines using time switching and 70's footage with great music, yet as with Beginners, which he also directed, it is character in which what he is most interested and excellent at developing.
Bening's Dorothea Fields, is a contradictory and spirited woman - divorced, proud, with heart and soul - full of self questioning.
She is smart, she has to question everything - including her own motives. She asks her younger house tenants for help - Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig and Billy Crudup - she fears losing her boy to the forces of time - The women will bring different perspectives to the young lad - Jamie, played with conviction by Lucas Jade Zumann. He is a growing boy, frustrated with his mother's interference, while also loving her dearly. Mills takes time to introduce us to the depth of each character, in the here and now, from their pasts and by looking ahead to their future lives - by the end of this heartwarming, funny and sometimes sad film, the viewer can have a full understanding of each character. This group of actors puts maximum effort into 20th Century Women, but it remains Bening’s show. She’s part-ego centric, part-terrified, part comedienne, wanting, so much, to be a strong mother in touch with modern youth.
She half-enjoys, but mostly dismisses current abrasive punk rock styles. When Crudup introduces her to the loud radical band, Black Flag, she says she cannot hear any meaningful words.
Her taste is more mellow, clear 50's jazz - the two styles are sometimes played against each other in quick cuts.
Her home is a base for almost everyone she meets, she loves debate - The words of Judy Blume, M Scott Peck, Jimmy Carter (his awesome crisis of confidence speech) and the essays contained in, Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From the Women’s Liberation Movement, all make appearances with clips from Koyaanisqatsi - Life out of Balance.
Dorothea also gives advice to her two female tenants, Abbie (Gerwig) and Julie (Fanning) her son's current heart throb.
Julie : [talking about cigarettes] Can I have one?
Dorothea : No, they're really bad for you.
Julie : You smoke all the time.
Dorothea : You know when I started, they weren't bad for you, they were just stylish, sort of edgy, so... it's different for me."
Mills wanted to make a love letter to women and took inspiration from those in his early life for the characters of Dorothea and Abbie. "It felt like I was raised by my mum and sisters - I was always appealing to women in the punk scene or women in my world. I always leaned to them," he said.
Mills took his completed script to Annapurna Pictures, who financed the making of the film.
20th Century Women had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 8,2016, and was released on December 28, 2016, by A24. It was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards, Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and Best Actress for Bening, as well as for Best Original Screenplay at the 89th Oscars.
It had its' world premiere at the New York Film Festival on October 8, 2016.
20th Century Women was released all over the United States on January 20, 2017, grossing $1,385,336 in its first weekend. It went on to gross a total of $5,664,764.
Eventually, The Writers Guild Foundation listed the script as one of the best of the 2010's, describing the film as, "an excellent study in character development."
If you like your movies more humanistic, with no monsters or gadgets, 20th Century Women really is a rush of gorgeous human interaction and poetic observation. It is a coming-of-age story, a comedy, a meditation on sexuality, morals, politics and music, all at the same time - for this reviewer it can handle countless re-watches to take in all the rich, charming detail of Mills' and Bening's work.
Trailer
Rating
**Number of SUBs out of 10 - 8
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