20th Century Women review: a dazzled and confused paean to nostalgia

It’s 1979 in Santa Barbara and single mom Dorothea (Annette Bening) lives in vast, crumbling house with her 15-year-old son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), a DIY-ready hippie (Billy Crudup), and Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a plum-haired art photographer with no discernible means.

Determined to aid her son’s navigation toward manhood, the chain-smoking matriarch enlists Abbie and Julie (Elle Fanning), Jamie’s 17-year-old best friend, who lies in bed, platonically, beside him every night.

Abbie photographs the objects she owns, a project that echoes the structure of 20th Century Women. There's not a great deal of plot or indeed focus in the endearing new film from Beginners director Mike Mills.

But there are many montages, textures, and pile-ups of period details: Our Bodies Ourselves, chatter about clitoral orgasms, Talking Heads, enormous pregnancy tests, Black Flag, and Jimmy Carter’s “crisis of confidence” speech all get airings and outings.

Too often characters speak as if they were reminiscing about the period in which they are living, an invasive, anachronistic nostalgia that is beefed up by the inclusion of narrated, mixed media collages which skip back to Dorothea’s Depression-Era upbringing and forward towards her death.

Too often, the film’s commendable efforts at nuance and complexity make for characters and circumstance that are simply too unwieldy to fit into a movie-sized structure. Too often, one yearns for the simple organising principles of three-act structure and boring linear storytelling.

Against this, there is a tremendous ensemble who power through even the flimsiest scenes: Fanning and Gerwig once again dazzle us with their star wattage, following on from Jackie, Crudup reminds us that he's back and rearing to go, and Bening's performance makes us cross than Meryl got the nod for the so-so Florence Foster Jenkins. No fair.