Coming off his wonderful drama Beginners, Mike Mills is back this year with a new feature titled 20th Century Women. Starring Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, Elle Fanning, and Billy Crudup, the story follows a family in the late 1970s living in Santa Barbara. Ahead of a world premiere as NYFF’s Centerpiece selection and a December release from A24, the first trailer has now arrived.
“I was taken aback by 20th Century Women,” New York Film Festival Director and Selection Committee Chair Kent Jones says. “It’s made with an extraordinarily unusual level of craft and attention to detail, human and visual, which is now all but extinct. As someone who actually lived through 1979 in middle-class America, I will testify to the fact that Mike Mills and his remarkable cast approach the level of the uncanny. I felt like I was back there, with all the shared behaviors and worries, the divisions, the look and feel and smell of the world as it was.”
Check out the trailer below, and return for our review.
Mills’s texturally and behaviorally rich new comedy keeps redefining itself as it goes along, creating a moving group portrait of particular people in a particular place (Santa Barbara) at a particular moment in the 20th century (1979), one lovingly attended detail at a time. The great Annette Bening, in one of her very best performances, is a single mother raising her teenage son (newcomer Lucas Jade Zumann) in a sprawling bohemian house, shared by an itinerant carpenter (Billy Crudup) and a punk artist with a Bowie haircut (Greta Gerwig), and frequented by her son’s rebellious friend (Elle Fanning). 20th Century Women is warm, funny, and a work of passionate artistry.
20th Century Women opens on December 23rd and expands wide on January 20th.