‘20th Century Women’ is like a filmed memory
Written and directed by Mike Mills, and loosely based on his own childhood, it tells the story of a teenage boy being raised by a single mother in a big house in Santa Barbara.
To make extra money, Mom has two boarders, a teenage girl and a young woman in her 20s.
Mills was born in 1966, and for a lot of us who lived a substantial portion of our lives in the last century, there’s a weird thing that sometimes happens as we think of people from our past, who were older than we were.
Looking back brings mixed feelings of omniscience and helplessness, as well as awe before the mystery.
Abbie tries to teach Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) to be a sensitive man and tells him about women’s orgasms.
[...] she regards him as a best friend, leans on him for relationship advice and has the habit of stripping down to her underwear and climbing into his bed to express sisterly closeness.
Tangentially, the world outside goes by — the world is always tangential, except in times of calamity — and so we hear and see manifestations of things like punk rock.
In 1979, it was still possible to find otherwise intelligent, sensible people smoking around the clock.
Every time the story is on a knife edge and can drop deeper into turmoil or recede back to the normal flows and ebbs of life, Mills chooses the latter.
[...] though Mills never makes us care about these people as much as he does, we receive “20th Century Women” as a privileged communication.
Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle’s movie critic.