Review: 20th CENTURY WOMEN

Middle aged Dorothea watches as her son Jamie grows into his adolescence and feels increasingly out of touch with him. It's 1979, California, and she lives in the kind of mixed generational share house I can recall from that era in Queensland. Does it take a share house to raise a child or should Dorothea seek the help of people closer to Jamie's age? She tries with Abbie (in her mid-20s already an ageing punk, yes that's meant to be funny in the film as well) and teenaged Julie who flees her single-mother therapist's house nightly to sleep platonically with Jamie. The girl and young woman say yes to helping out but admit they probably won't be able to do much. Conspicuous by his absence in the discussion is ageing hippie William, renovator and handyman but too uncommitted for the task. There's always the idea of let Jamie get through it himself which might just happen anyway.

You get the idea, this is a screen version of the roman fleuve or river novel in which life rolls out before us with here and there a rip, snag or rapid but mostly just there for the pleasure of the flow. We see relationships develop through trial and others bruised by neglect. We see life. Not having the gimmick of Boyhood where we were as engaged by the real ageing of the cast in time as we were by some fine filmmaking and running on a much smaller timeline (outside of narration we go through less than one year) we must at least warm up to these characters in the course of two screen hours.

The good news is that this pretty much happens. Annette Benning delivers a character who invites us despite her resistance to change. Is her performance a touch studied with its measured facial expressions and actor-workshop voice control? Maybe, but those things are done with charm enough for us to follow. Greta Gerwig breaks a little free of the cage of quirk she made for herself with the execrable Frances Ha, allowing for some real pathos to open her up to us. Elle Fanning has the toughest job of the three women of the title in building a tightly fraught teenager out of her barely veiled pain towards us. She is the most intentionally frustrating character and we need to see that this is protection as much as youth and in some touching moments of vulnerability we do. The women, past, present and future, in their way, give us a century of western life.

For his part, Lucas Jade Zumann who has to compete with all this for his time on screen can occasionally fade into the scenery as everything else happens, even when he is at its centre. It's not the actor's fault (though by comparison his is the least forceful performance); he is the stand-in for the writer director who is recalling himself as more observer than actor. Perhaps the most helpful thing to say of him is that he fits. Billy Crudup, who I remember most immediately as a rock star in Almost Famous and then more recently with tense restraint as the journalist/confessor in Jackie, is a quiet delight as William with his "far out" party pickup lines and formless life advice. These are the men of 20th Century Women, essential but to one side which is the purpose this time.

While the flow of life idea works for most of the running time there are a few too many false endings which drew winces. Even if the subsequent scenes assuaged by providing fresh interest or at least charm the trend began to feel like undisciplined writing even with the low-plot scheme taken into account.

Something I did enjoy, though, was that the period nostalgia was kept at a low setting. The late 70s punk scene just feels here like a band scene, the records and the gigs the way they always have. Handy, of course, to set the story at a time when the active younger generation determinedly didn't have its own patois so that instant self-embarrassment doesn't appear. The setting is also important as a kind of farewell to the youth of the pre-internet world where the consultation, the guidance and the wisdom came more tightly filtered from parents and peers and so much had to rely on trial and a lot of error. For me, a major pleasure of this film was not nostalgic for a cultural period so much as the sense of promise, of self-regulation and social progress that we felt was achievable against the shadow of the creaking end of the cold war and its daily promise of global annihilation. If we could just get through high school and get out there and make things better. Didn't happen, of course, and never quite does, but the warmth of it and the dangers of the warmth were palpable.