Annette Bening rules in 20th Century Women

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      Starring Annette Bening. Rated 14A

      It’s never too soon, or too late, to look back at your own history. In 20th Century Women, diversely talented writer-director Mike Mills takes a playful pass at the gender roles we’re still negotiating more than 35 years after the frankly autobiographical stuff recalled here.

      In the similarly well-crafted Beginners, Mills (who’s not the bass player in R.E.M., but has designed and shot music videos for Moby and others) detailed his father’s late-in-life coming-out. Here, he takes on the travails of his mother, who stayed in Santa Barbara and ran a chaotic boarding house after Dad moved away.

      Annette Bening has one of her best-ever roles as Dorothea Fields, whose name is probably a nod to Dorothy Fields, lyricist for “A Fine Romance”, “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, and many swing-era tunes our frank-talking heroine grew up with.

      Nostalgia figures heavily in this Century, which takes place mostly in 1979, a year of hideous cars and even worse fashions. But the film occasionally rockets back to Ms. Fields’s pre–WWII childhood and jumps forward, through clever use of archival graphics, to the turn of this millennium. Stylistically, Mills mixes a more heartfelt version of Wes Anderson’s artificiality with the quietly edgy surrealism of Miranda July, to whom he is married.

      The story centres nominally on Dorothea’s 14-year-old son, Jamie, played by newcomer Lucas Jade Zumann, currently a bit lost among Mom’s tenants. These include a working-class dropout (Billy Crudup) helping to restore her heritage home; a forward-looking, if kooky, artist (Greta Gerwig); and teen resident Julie (Elle Fanning), whom Jamie has had a crush on since childhood.

      Between her many menthol Salems (“They weren’t bad for you when I was growing up!”), Dorothea notices her only child’s moody shift into adolescence. Someone who routinely follows acute observations with exactly the wrong responses, she asks her tenants to help raise the boy—and almost immediately starts resenting their interference.

      Along the way, Jamie sees his first punk bands, memorizes major passages of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and keeps pining for Julie. Nothing huge happens, but all of it evokes the subtle stuff that makes us the men and women we are, were, and will be.

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