20th Century Women

Yesterday, had a dental cleaning; the usual, selling me the grinding guard, the electronic toothbrush. All of which I should buy. And, always, the only appointment was a 2 pm, which leaves me at a weird point in my workday.

I decided to take the rest of the day off and catch a matinee of 20th Century Women. It's about a mother and son, at its heart. But, in the beginning scenes, there are five people living in a large, ramshackle old house in Santa Barbara owned and perpetually renovated by Dorothea, played with intelligence and grace by the underappreciated Annette Benning. In the early scenes, you watch the people coming in and out and its clear they move about the house, inhabit it at some level together, but that they are not a traditional family. And, I liked that the film is not in a hurry to explain their relationship or the nature of the family these five folks constitute. Explaining always suggests something needs explaining, that its not quite what it seems.

The film really does revolve around the two members who are related,  Dorothea and her son Jamie. Dorothea had Jamie in 1964 when she was forty. Jamie is now in the midst of teendom and increasingly a mystifying riddle to his mother. She worries he is not right, harmed by growing up without a real male presence in  his life. There is her tenant and handyman living in the house, William, a hippy of sorts who is way deep into making rough, amorphous clay bowls. Jamie and William don't identify. So, Dorothea seeks the help of Jamie's best friend Julie, a malcontent teen in flight from her psychotherapist mother, and her tenant Abbie, a punk-feminist photographer recovering from cervical cancer. She asks them to help make her son a man, to share their lives with him so that he might have a better idea of his future and how to get to it.

They do their best. Abbie introduces him to late seventies feminism, sharing two books with him, Our Bodies Ourselves and Sisterhood Is Powerful. He learns of clitoral orgasm and decides he is a feminist and expresses his desire to satisfy women and treat them with respect. He discovers reality often conflicts with intent. Julie, his peer, is his best friend and escapes her house to be with him at every chance, even climbing scaffolding outside the house to reach his room and sleep platonically with him at night. When he gets frisky, she pushes him off, telling him she's too close to him have sex with him and sex would ruin their friendship.  Both provide an education to him of sorts, as his mother asked.

However, much of what he learns seems to be in the service of better knowing his mother. This is a story of a parent and a child who love each other but are unable to fully express that love. Both seek to know the other but yet continually they miss each other. There is a wonderful scene in which Jamie reads a passage from Sisterhood Is Powerful to his mother which seems to pretty clearly identify her. The essay is about how society choses not to see older women, to recognize their wit, their beauty, their desire. Instead, society simply ignores older women till they fade away. He presents this essay to his mother as if he has found a key to understanding her. Dorothea is offended, and curtly tells her son she doesn't need to read books to understand herself and he wont find her there. And, there is something true to her response. Dorothea is a one-of-a-kind. But, as there is never any truly one-of-a-kind, she rebuffs him out of a pride. The picture he offers in the hopes of gaining understanding, in the hopes she will confirm it, does seem fairly accurate on a certain, basic level.

Dorothea is an amazing woman. She is bohemian but not lazy or hazy. She has a clear integrity, a sense of what she's about. She's a traditionalist. She strives to try and understand everything, to bring a rational, calm perception to all. Unafraid. I loved one scene especially. William suddenly kisses Dorothea on the lips, in a sudden burst of passion or affection or who knows what. SHe asks him why he kissed her and he tells her he doesn't really know. She responds, you should always know why you kiss a woman. She then asks him whether or not he is sleeping with Abbie and he admits he is, but just for fun, it doesn't mean anything. She responds, why would you do that? Dorothea is always questioning her actions and looking for more.

But, she's vulnerable and hiding it as best she can. She is unhappy. She's never achieved a love of her life and she believes in love. And, at one point, she admits, she's failed to have this experience, and her honesty in this regard moved me to tears. She basically admits she so wanted to be in love, to tast the real thing, she rushed into relationships that didn't have a chance of true love. Moving.

Annette Benning is amazing. Greta Gerwig is worth the price of admissions. Watch her facial reactions. She has a vocabulary of faces that is unsurpassed. And, the soundtrack features some great punk/alt tracks from the time period, side-by-side with As Time Goes By and Louie Armstrong. Must see.