C'mon C'mon (2021)

C'mon C'mon is the latest from director and writer Mike Mills, whose 20th Century Women was a particular favorite of mine (and I thought Beginners was pretty good too). I'm not sure of everything about C'mon C'mon: the choice to go black and white has resulted in some luminously beautiful images but doesn't really fit the domestic mood for me. It reminded me that way of Alexander Payne's Nebraska. I suspect both pictures would have been at least as good in regular old color. And I have mixed feelings about the way C'mon C'mon is so determinedly focused on liberal blue-state types of problems. On the one hand it's a relief not have to hear anything at all, for once, about so-called conservative values and grave concerns about guns, abortion, and religious freedom, which seem to be absorbed into most mainstream movies nowadays. On the other hand, this story about a fractured family trying to keep it together feels like it's missing some obvious things about American life today. I'm probably too bought in to rightwing frames at this point. The story involves a brother, Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), a sister, Viv (Gaby Hoffmann), the sister's kid, Jesse (Woody Norman), and a crisis that forces Johnny to take over childcare for an uncertain amount of time. Johnny is single and middle-aged, with an interesting and unusual job as a freelance radio journalist who conducts open-ended interviews with kids of all ages about their views on life and the future. These interviews are woven into the fabric of C'mon C'mon for one of its most moving elements, along with quotations from literary sources that surprise and work amazingly well. Johnny travels a lot and ends up taking Jesse with him on trips to New York City and New Orleans while Viv tries to sort out a serious mental breakdown by her husband and Jesse's father in California. Woody Norman as Jesse is a revelation—a natural player who puts across a weird kid convincingly. I want to say very weird kid, but I think he's a lot like I remember myself and others, a kid just absorbing everything he can and uninhibited about his imaginary life. He's being raised in a liberal household so there's a lot of formal honesty about feelings and so forth, tolerance for people trying to work out their problems. There are also real crises and trauma going on—a lot of pain is creased into all of this. To me C'mon C'mon felt refreshingly healthy and heartening—for the most part I am crazy in love for this picture—but I can certainly see where Jesse is going to get on people's nerves. Hoffmann is also very good, playing a woman fully engaged with life and pain and joy. Phoenix, of course, is one of the best when it comes to dissociative rage, but a movie like this (or Her) reminds us he can play quite well in a whole other key. I feel cautious about praising this to the highest skies. I don't want to set anyone's expectations too high. But I really loved it and wholeheartedly recommend it.

20th Century Women (2016)

20th Century Women is a big-hearted movie full of Talking Heads songs and in many ways that's all I can ever ask of movie entertainment. We know now that this movie didn't manage the Oscar splash that was so clearly part of its reason for being. But what we're left with is first-rate, chockful of appealing stars with chemistry and a really sharp screenplay by director and writer Mike Mills, whose Beginners worked similar regions of human relations and attendant mysteries—warm, surprising, often funny. For that matter, for better or worse, Annette Bening's best movies are also about families falling apart and reassembling in the face of modern living. 20th Century Women fits well with both American Beauty and The Kids Are All Right. Bening plays Dorothea, of Santa Barbara, California, born in 1924. She had a son when she was 40, Jamie. Now it's 1979, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) is 15, she is 55, and she can't understand what is happening in the world. The relationship with Jamie's father didn't work—we don't hear much more than that about it, and he's not around. Dorothea lives in a big old house, lets rooms for rent, and is working on renovating the place with one of her tenants, William (Billy Crudup), a mixed-up but amiable hippie burnout. Another tenant is Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a punk-rocker with cervical cancer. In one priceless scene Abbie tries to explain the Raincoats to Dorothea while one of their albums plays on the turntable. Jamie wants a sexual relationship with 17-year-old Julie (Elle Fanning), who may be the most mixed-up one of all. But it's pretty close—they're all confused, and the Jimmy Carter malaise speech doesn't clear up much for them, though it's included. There's a lot of sentimentality to this. But 1979 is also a critical year in American history, and it's not in this movie by accident. There are lots of tender scenes here, and awkward ones too, but it works. It may be because I feel such a natural affinity for all these daffy, lovable people. It might be a movie aimed at my psychographic. Or it might be all those Talking Heads songs. But this is Bening's kind of movie and she's all over it like white on rice—gentle, acerbic, poised in her confusion. The movie is also more evidence for Mike Mills (I'm going to make a point of seeing Thumbsucker now, for one thing). 20th Century Women is light and often very funny, but behind that it's worrying about our futures. It cares, and it doesn't even have to. It's terrific.