California cringing

Writer-director Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women is set in Santa Barbara in 1979. There’s something about that city and that year that somehow sounds simultaneously distinctly individual and broadly typical, and that curious tension carries over to the characters in Mills’ script. We recognize these quirky, ordinary people, even though we’ve never met anybody exactly like them.

Taking these 20th-century women in order of their births, we have Dorothea Fields, born 1924 (Annette Bening in a quietly masterful performance). We first see her at the supermarket with her 15-year-old son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), looking out the store window as their Ford Galaxie mysteriously bursts into flames in the parking lot. Later, after the fire department has doused the blaze, Dorothea invites the fire captain to her birthday party that evening. When Jamie says that most people don’t do things like that, she says, “Yeah? Why not?”

Dorothea and Jamie’s house, like their lives, is rambling and in a constant state of renovation. Living with them is Abbie Porter (Greta Gerwig), born 1955, a punk photographer with hair redder than the flames of Dorothea’s late Ford. Abbie is trying to sort out her own life as she recovers from cervical cancer, the seeds of which were planted by a fertility drug that her mother took before she was born. The mother’s sense of guilt over that has estranged them, leading Abbie to rent a room from Dorothea.

Then there’s Julie Hamlin, born 1962 (Elle Fanning, who seems to be everywhere these days). She seeks refuge from her own ill-blended family by sneaking into Jamie’s bedroom. Jamie has feelings for her, but she insists on keeping it platonic, even as she pinballs meaninglessly from one hookup to the next. “Half the time I regret it,” she tells Jamie. Then why do it, he asks. “Because half the time I don’t regret it.”

Rounding out the menage is William (Billy Crudup), another roomer. William pays rent by performing the endless renovations on the house—and now, by finding a used Volkswagen to replace Dorothea’s burnt Galaxie. William is easygoing and affable, but he seems somehow to be wandering even when he’s standing still.

Mills lets these people roll around and bounce off each other, and in their haphazard interactions he shows them alternately tiptoeing and stumbling toward the people they will eventually become. Sometimes the action is sped up, like a silent movie, as if to suggest time passing too fast. Sometimes one of them will narrate in voice-over, recounting the past or predicting the future (“My mom was born in 1924. …” “I’ll die in 1999 …”). Their shared lives are punctuated by events, but little really “happens” in the movie as a whole. Mills instills the rhythm of life without the forced buildup of melodrama.

20th Century Women is very much like the people in it—a little aimless, maybe, but not too badly so, and extremely likeable.