Beginners director Mike Mills is finally returning this year with his new feature 20th Century Women, and thankfully it was worth the wait. Starring Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, Elle Fanning, and Billy Crudup, the story follows a family in the late 1970s living in Santa Barbara. Premiering to great response as NYFF’s centerpiece selection, ahead of a December release from A24, there’s now a full-length second trailer.
We said in our review, “Has Mike Mills ever been unsympathetic to another human being? If his two most recent features, Beginners and this year’s NYFF centerpiece selection, 20th Century Women, were the only available evidence, one might be inclined to think not. Overused and a catch-all though it may be, “humanist” is a label that’s earned rather emphatically — not for expressing interest in people, but by mining into what makes that person. Those who they love, what they hold onto or spiritually, the things they own, what they’ve experienced, and, most important of all, how they process time cannot here be taken for granted in the slightest bit. Both films comprising this philosophy initially strike this writer as unbearable, readily digestible existentialism for dummies; and then they continue along a well-planned path until the material is less of a drama than a hyper-perceptive communication of experience.”
Check out the trailer and poster below.
With 20th Century Women, acclaimed filmmaker Mike Mills (the Academy Award®- winning Beginners) brings us a richly multilayered, funny, heart-stirring celebration of the complexities of women, family, time, and the connections we search for our whole lives. It is a film that keeps redefining itself as it goes along, shifting with its characters as they navigate the pivotal summer of 1979.
Set in Santa Barbara, the film follows Dorothea Fields (Annette Bening), a determined single mother in her mid-50s who is raising her adolescent son, Jamie (newcomer Lucas Jade Zumann, in a breakout performance) at a moment brimming with cultural change and rebellion. Dorothea enlists the help of two younger women in Jamie’s upbringing — via Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a free-spirited punk artist living as a boarder in the Fields’ home, and Julie (Elle Fanning), a savvy and provocative teenage neighbor.
Mills expertly recreates the warmth and passion of a great memory – but also the urgency and energy of three generations in the throes of momentous transition. Bening gives one of her very best performances as Dorothea, conveying with subtle yet tremendous emotional power both her unconditional love for her son and her increasing bewilderment about the world she is watching him enter. Gerwig, Fanning, and Billy Crudup all do outstanding work, creating complex, unique characters who each contribute in crucial ways to Jamie’s upbringing. 20th Century Women is a poignant love letter to the people who raise us – and the times that form us – as this makeshift family forges fragile connections that will mystify, haunt and inspire them through their lives.
20th Century Women opens on December 23rd and expands wide on January 20th.