20th Century Women (2016)

Obviously there are two versions of this film in theaters. The one I saw was unbearably slow, boring, badly acted, horribly edited and scored. If someone put a gun to my head and told me to sit through this again, I'd take the bullet and end my misery quicker. Letting Annette Benning look dowdy and her age apparently is being mistaken for acting, while the rest of the cast, all good actors, are left to wander without benefit of dialogue or plot. There seems to be a stab at defining feminism in the 1970s, but good luck if you can figure out the point. The owner of my local theater told me that they were yanking this dog as soon as they contractually could, noting "the managers of the chain should have known better."

Fmovies: When I saw that On Demand offered this film starring Annette Benning and Greta Gerwig, I was excited and ordered it immediately. I stuck it out for the first hour and a quarter, and then turned it off. What a lousy script! I am always one who enjoys a film without much action that focuses mostly on dialogue and/or relationships, but this film was a bore in all areas. Nothing happened, and the dialogue was just plain dull. And predictable. How did this film get made? As indicated this was a great disappointment to me because for the fine actors in it, it was a waste. I wonder what they thought about it.

A podcast, not a film. The worst of Cassevetes and Baumbach rolled into a therapy session without a coherent thesis or a single memorable shot. And the biggest irony is that Dorothea, Annette Benning's character, would have walked out of this movie with utter disdain if she happened into it in 1979.

20th Century Women fmovies. Mike Mills is a music video producer, graphic designer and writer/director of documentaries and feature films. He has made music videos for Yoko Ono, Moby and Air. He has done album art for the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth and Ol' Dirty Bastard. He also makes posters and fabrics as part of a series of works called "Humans by Mike Mills". Why this biographical sketch of Mike Mills? Well, it might help you understand his films. Two of the first three features that he wrote and directed (not counting 2005's "Thumbsucker") are semi-autobiographical. His 2010 film, "Beginners" is about his father who came out as gay late in life (a role which won Christopher Plummer an Oscar). Mills' 2016 feature, "20th Century Women" (R, 1:59), is about his mother, a role that earned Annette Benning some awards season love.

In 1979 Santa Barbara, Dorothea (Bening) only has one child and she's divorced from the boy's father, but she still has a house full of people. Besides her 15-year-old son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), there's the boarder she took in, a 20-something photographer and cancer survivor named Abbie (Greta Gerwig) and William (Billy Crudup), the middle-aged handyman who is gradually renovating Dorothea's 75-year-old house. Then, last but not least, there's 17-year-old Julie (Elle Fanning), who doesn't technically live in the house but might as well, as she often climbs in through Jamie's bedroom window to talk and sleep with him, as part of a very close but platonic friendship. Dorothea also frequently invites near-strangers over for dinner, such as someone she meets at a music club or local firemen who help her out of a jam.

As a mother, 55-year-old Dorothea is loving and devoted, but also insecure and kind of clueless. She's deeply concerned about raising her son to be "a good man" in the absence of a regular male influence. (She rarely dates and William and Jamie don't really connect.) Dorothea's solution is to ask Abbie and Julie to help her raise her son. She wants Julie to look out for Jamie and Abbie to share her life with him. Both are a bit confused by the request, but agree to do what they can. Abbie lends Jamie some feminist books from a college class she took, Julie teaches Jamie to smoke like a man, and neither of them is shy about talking with Jamie about sex. Jamie keeps insisting that he's fine, but his world does begin to expand, just as his mother also comes out of her comfort zone to experience more of the modern age.

"20th Century Women" is boring and basically pointless. The film is billed by Mills as a love letter to the women who raised him. (Besides Bening's portrayal of Mills' mother, Gerwig's character is loosely based on Mills' sister.) Most of us were raised by a mother and/or had strong, loving female influences in our lives to whom we owe a great deal, but few of us would expect people to sit for two hours learning about the women who nurtured us. It's not that Dorothea is uninteresting as a character, but she doesn't come off as any more interesting than my own mother, for example. What's more, there doesn't seem like there's much to learn from Dorothea's permissive and scattershot parenting style and, excepting the epilogue voice-overs at the end of the film, none of the characters really grow much – or have the potential to inspire us very much. The acting is excellent (especially Bening), but that does little to entertain when it&#

Big disappointment. There is zero dramatic tension in this leisurely-paced coming of age, homage-to-Mom film. A period piece set up the coast from LA near Santa Barbara in the late 1970's, it is the tale of a 15-year old boy and his single Mom who is worried he needs help becoming a man. So she fills the household with helpers. The characters talk and talk and talk and Bening smokes and smokes and smokes and by the end of the film you wonder why anyone backed this rather self-obsessed little indulgence. Bening is the center of attention, and she tries hard, but she wears as much as she delights as Mom. The other characters seem like stage props with lines. I found it hard to get with most of them. Several people walked out of the screening I attended. I was tempted.

I understand the rage of many other US reviewers because this movie is so far from usual Hollywood clichés that it does not even look like an US movie! It seems an European movie. Bergman, Fellini and stuff... It is NOT boring. It has its pace and it is exacly what it has to be. I identified myself at different levels. I was born in 1958, just like the main actress (great performance). And like Dorothea I had a daugther when I was in my 40s (she now is 15, like Jamie, Dorothea's son) and I don't know how to talk to her, I don't like much of the music she likes and so on. I was a teenager in the 70s, so I identified with Jamie, great character: I wish I had one thousandth of his self-consciousness when I was his age!

This movie was oxygen for suffocating US major's movies, after sequels and remakes and CGI shows finally something to think about.