We watched Twentieth Century Women over the weekend. I was completely blown away by it, and have since read a number of reviews and been irritated by those who missed the point completely. The New Yorker‘s film reviews, as always, being the most rage-inducing.
It’s a film about three women, a boy and a man, at the end of the 1970s. It evokes a place, a feeling for what is passing or already lost and for changing relationships. It’s a bit of a boy’s coming of age story, ho hum, but it’s more than that. It’s not a boy becoming a man, but a boy opening up to the world. For that reason it isn’t a self-regarding film, it’s not an Adrian Mole film, it’s about poeple who genuinely want to understand, who change and grow in understanding in the most subtle ways. Annette Benning, who plays his mother, is remarkable in her subtlety and complexity. It’s a generous film to all its characters. I really loved it and have since been thinking and talking about it with the gentleman friend.
Perhaps the criticism that enraged me the most was that it was like a cutrate version of Wes Anderson. It’s like Wes Anderson only in the most superficial way, in its use of intertitles and stills. But I generally dislike Wes Anderson’s mannered coldness, and this was anything but cold. It shows that a mannered film can be done well.
It was a film made by a man whose mother has died and he looks back and tries to make sense of the time they had together. Perhaps you have to lose a parent in the same way to understand that.