20th Century Women (2016)

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20th Century Women Movie Review

20th Century Women is a 2016 comedy drama film directed by Mike Mills and starring Annette Bening, Elle Fanning and Greta Gerwig. It is such a peculiar film.

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“Whatever you think your life is going to be like,

just know, it’s not gonna be anything like that.“

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When I say peculiar, I mean to say that I just do not have a definite, clear opinion of it and that rarely happens to me. But there is just a lot to love and a lot to hate here. To me the story mostly falls in the latter category as the film felt aimless in my opinion with no statement or message present whatsoever. We just follow the lives of these people, but only in 1979 and that timeframe meant that the film was too narrow and it somehow tried to be more epic in scope, but it failed.

Dorothea is the best and most realistic character here, but all of the others were too weird. Jamie was to me quite annoying and plain unlikable, Abbie was a typical Greta Gerwig character and one of the rare instances where I found her just repeating herself and Julie is also quite familiar and actually also unlikable. That is definitely a problem here as all of these people are pretty annoying for most of the running time. But the acting is definitely quite good with Annette Bening stealing the show and delivering a strong performance in a demanding role.

I liked the dialogue quite a bit, but 20th Century Women still felt overly feminist to me personally as some lines were ridiculously aggressive. Some conversations were great, but others felt unrealistic and just plain silly.

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The movie is a dramedy, but to me nothing was funny here and it works much better as a drama. The emotion is problematically conveyed here. The first half in particular was overly sentimental and it just wasn’t earned back then when we hadn’t yet known the characters or their stories, but the second half is much better and it has some moving parts there. All in all, I liked this film to some degree, but it was mostly too weird and annoying for my taste.

20th Century Women is very strongly acted across the board plus it features some moving scenes and quite interesting conversations, but the first half was overly sentimental, most of the characters are very unlikable and so annoying and the film is mostly too aggressive in its themes, weird in its characters and ultimately somewhat aimless in plot.