Cathartic Sobbing to 20th Century Women

and a discussion of only children in cinema & life

Just last month I boldly declared that Todd Haynes was my favorite living director. While that’s not not true, I recently watched 20^th Century Women and had a startling realization: is Mike Mills actually my favorite living director? Quite possibly!

At this point I’ve seen all of his feature-length films: Thumbsucker, which I don’t remember at all because I saw it in college. Beginners, which I loved. C’mon C’mon, which I wrote about at length. And now 20^th Century Women, which could be my favorite of his.

Here’s what Mike Mills does so well: in the romance community, we’re very familiar with the term “slow burn.” A slow burn romance is the opposite of the oft-reviled “insta-love.” In a slow-burn, we get to know the characters and their attraction slowly. They get to know each other slowly, as the romantic/sexual tension increases by mere degrees at a time. Until finally, it boils over. It explodes! By which I mean, they kiss and/or have sex, depending on what kind of romance you’re reading. People have passionate feelings about slow burn, because it can feel delightfully satisfying when it’s done well. You don’t know true romance novel frustration until you’ve been waiting for two people who are clearly in love with each other to just kiss already after 250 pages of bantering/bickering/friendship.

Well, Mike Mills does a great slow burn, but instead of the romance being kept at a simmer, it’s my emotions. When I watched Beginners, for the first 75% of the film I thought, “I’m enjoying this! It’s fun. But I wouldn’t say it’s as emotional as everyone else seems to think it is.” And then near the end, in one montage, I found myself absolutely sobbing, just wrecked by this film.

And that’s exactly what happened with 20^th Century Women. I was absolutely having a great time watching it, but all I was getting was some slight eye-watering…not even an achievement, if you ask me. Any given country song or commercial can make my eyes water with emotion. But then we got to the ending montage (Mike Mills loves montages and stock footages and they love him back!) and all of a sudden, I was crying so hard that I couldn’t see the screen. My dog left the room, he was so freaked out by my sudden display of emotion. Mike Mills…you did it again!

The main reason I watched 20^th Century Women was that I saw multiple people talk about it online, so maybe this can be your motivation to watch it. If you don’t know what it’s about, here’s a quick summary. Annette Bening plays Dorothea, a single mom of one son, Jamie, in 1979. She loves smoking and having Billy Crudup (William) work on renovations for her giant, old, slightly decrepit but also beautiful home. Greta Gerwig (Abbie) is a tenant who loves a) wearing colorful tights (a Mike Mills trademark! Makes sense that he was married to Miranda July for so long…he loves a woman in tights), b) not paying her rent on time, and c) punk music. Elle Fanning (Julie) is Jamie’s best friend and he’s in love with her because they’re teenagers with raging hormones. She, however, is having sex with various Bad Boys instead of him. Dorothea worries that she isn’t doing a good job raising Jamie alone and asks Abbie and Julie to help her…well, it’s not really sure what she wants help with. Raising Jamie? Loving Jamie? Instructing Jamie in the ways of the world? But help they do, in their own ways. Abbie gives him a lot of 1970s feminist literature and he starts getting in fights at the skate park because of his newfound feminist awakening (when his mother asks him what a fight was about, he says “clitoral stimulation”). Julie, through no fault of her own, breaks his heart. Jamie grows up and away and sometimes toward his mother as she continues growing in her own way—because we’re never really finished growing up, are we? A movie can be a coming of age film even if it’s about a full-grown woman.

It's a quiet movie—perhaps even a great example of Nothing Happens Cinema, given that it’s really just a snapshot of a brief time when a few people’s lives intersect in a significant way—but Mike Mills uses it to examine the themes that show up again and again in his work. It’s about family: he’s said that while Beginners was about his father, 20^th Century Women is about his mother. It’s about people who are desperately seeking connection while also instinctively pushing each other away, kept apart by their own human frailties while also needing to be known (again, makes sense that he was married to Miranda July because this feels like a much more commercial version of her work!). But, most interesting to me and my life, he explores what it’s like to raise an only child.

Artwork by Carson Ellis. Purchase a print on Buy Olympia.

Before I had my son, I assumed the biggest divide was between parents and non-parents, but there’s another divide I never considered: the one between parents of one child and parents of more children. As a non-parent, I didn’t even see the difference between these lives. You either have kids or you don’t, right? But in practice, it feels much different. Culturally, two or three child families are everywhere…or maybe this is a type of confirmation bias, or the frequency illusion! Maybe there are actually one-child families all over the place, in real life and in media. I certainly know many other people, both close friends and online acquaintances, who have one child. But it still feels as if this is the unusual choice, that people are waiting for you to have another the second you have the first.

And then there are the aphorisms. You don’t regret having another child, but you could regret not having one. (As someone who’s read a lot of fiction about parenting, I do not think this is even remotely true.) One child is a hobby, two is parenting. (So dismissive that it strikes me as cruel…imagine being so uninterested in the reality of other people’s lives.) And my least favorite, one repeated often by internet experts and as recently as today on a Facebook group I should not be a part of: don’t think about how hard it is to have young kids now, think about how wonderful it will be to have a full family dinner table when they’re adults.

I find this last one so incredibly hurtful that I almost can’t put it into words! There are many reasons a person might stop at one child, and from personal experience I can tell you that those reasons likely don’t include “a lack of considering their future happiness.” I know the reasons we’re stopping at one child, and I feel relatively secure in that choice…but having a pretty consistent message that actually, you’re going to be very lonely in your old age because you selfishly thought only about your present happiness and neglected your future doesn’t feel good, per se. I mean, I’m primarily thinking about being the best mother and wife I can be with the one wonderful child I have because I don’t think my (wonky at the BEST of times!) brain could handle another postpartum period without tipping into the deep end!! But, as the internet philosophers say, go off I guess.

Mike Mills, as shown in his films, cares deeply about the life of a one-child mother—specifically, the life of a one-child single mother, something I can’t speak to since I have a husband who is a very active father. C’mon C’mon features Gabby Hoffman raising her son alone while her partner is in crisis, and in 20^th Century Women it’s just Dorothea and Jamie, his dad present only in phone calls. They’re very different films with different aims: Joaquin Phoenix is the lead in C’mon C’mon, the relationship between him and his nephew the biggest one in the film. 20^th Century Women is about many different relationships. The fraught, romantically-tinged friendship between Jamie and Julie. The pseudo-big-sister relationship between Abbie and Jamie. The romantic-ish relationships between Abbie and William and Dorothea and William. But the one at the heart is the relationship between Dorothea and Jamie, the one that is changing every day and will continue to change as he gets older. As Dorothea tells Abbie, with sadness and a little bit of wonder, “You get to see him out in the world, as a person. I never will.” That’s a wallop.

Mike Mills also demonstrates a deep understanding of women’s lives and concerns—sex, love, fear of pregnancy, fear of not getting pregnant, etc.—that feels unusual for a male director. It never feels performative because he’s combining that with a deep interest in what it means to be a man, to be a boy growing into a man in this world—now or in the 1970s. At one point Dorothea says, “I think history has been tough on men. I mean, they can't be what they were, and they can't figure out what's next.”

At one point, Jamie says something to the effect of, “I liked it when it was just us.” But it can never really be just them. What both C’mon C’mon and 20^th Century Women show is that raising one child can actually be a big full life—it can be just as full as the one simplistic parenting quotes speak about. Dorothea, as shown in that montage at the end, has a rich inner life and a world of interests to explore. She has a literal dinner table full of tenants and friends and relative strangers, and her life is full with one child. Their relationship is special, even as it changes—they have each other, but they also have so much more.

Dorothea says at one point about Jamie, “I know him less every day.” And maybe that’s the biggest truth about parenting contained here. If you’re doing it right, you do know your child less every day. They should be learning things you don’t know, meeting people you’ve never met, dreaming of things that weren’t even possible for you. Maybe the best gift you can give them is the chance to have close relationships that have nothing to do with you.

20^th Century Women is currently available to stream on Max. The next Alice post is coming up next week for paid subscribers…this month we’re talking about Reluctantly Alice. See you soon. xo