Mike Mill’s 2016 film 20th Century Women is a love letter to the women who raise us.
20th Century Women follows Jamie and his depression era mother Dorothea as they navigate his adolescence in Santa Barbara in 1979, a relatively confusing time to grow up. Dorothea is a single mother, an inn keeper of sorts, and a bit of a bohemian. When she decides she needs help raising her son she enlists the help of Abbie, a fun punk artist who is also a cancer survivor, and Jamie’s friend Julie, a local girl with a taste for the scandalous.
The film chronicles Jamie’s adolescence, we watch as he gets involved in his local punk scene, gets drunk for the first time, and reads pivotal feminist texts. Despite the premise, the women in Jamie’s life are not one dimensional characters intended to further his narrative. Instead, Jamie is in awe of them and their incredibly complicated and interesting lives.
20th Century Women also brings home the heartbreak of motherhood. In a particularly poignant conversation with Abbie, Dorothea describes the painful reality of having a child that you can never truly know. She relishes Abbie’s chance to see her son interact in the real world, to see him fail and try and be a person.
I love everything about this movie. I love the cinematography, the dreamy soundtrack, the political upheaval, and the realness of it all. My favorite scene is when Abbie makes everyone at the house’s dinner table openly discuss and say the word “menstruation” to remedy the uncomfortableness and shame that surrounds the topic. Isn’t it liberating to talk about things like that so openly and brazenly. That’s what this movie is for me, talking about the things I have a hard time talking about.