The opening shots of Mike Mills’ (Beginners) 2016 film, 20th Century Women, show us the Californian ocean. The water is moving slowly, yet looks fierce and wild. It is worth admiring but highly unpredictable to be a part of. In essence, it is the inner visual of what every person growing up and finding their place in the world looks like. It is what raising a child on your own looks like. It’s what being told your life is never going to be the way you imagine it looks like.
It is as startling and perfect an image Mills could begin with. A few seconds of nature’s power reminding us how little control we all have.
The story, on the surface, sounds simple and perhaps inconsequential: a single mother raises her teenage son in a house of interesting characters in 1979 Santa Barbara. Afraid that she’s not giving her son the kind of upbringing he needs, she asks two women – one a twentysomething roommate, and the other her son’s high school best friend – to help her. Essentially, she wants them to fill the role of the father he doesn’t have around. When she first asks them, they’re absolutely befuddled. How could they do such a thing and what does that even look like? But the ways they navigate this proposition and how it impacts Dorothea’s (Annette Bening) son is a big part of its beauty.
As the movie went along, I found myself sucked into its laidback vibe, but also just randomly writing down dialogue that stuck out to me (fun fact: it was a lot). At least once a week, I think about when Abbie (Greta Gerwig) describes to Dorothea about all the shenanigans she got her son into at a party the night before. When Abbie expresses surprise that isn’t mad about all of it, Dorothea’s lays down a whopper of a line:
“You get to see him out in the world, as a person. I never will.”
I think about this all the time. How our parents are never not our parents. From the time we’re born, they feel a sense of responsibility and they’ll never be able to have that mental, emotional freedom of seeing us as regular people in the world. It’s a beautiful, somewhat heartbreaking thought that’s stuck in my ribs ever since.
And the great lines, they keep on coming. Like when Dorothea says, “Men always feel like they have to fix things for women or they’re not doing anything – but some things can’t be fixed. Just be there.” Or when Abbie says, “Whatever you think your life is going to be like…just know it’s not going to be anything like that.”
In the last shots of the film, Dorothea is on a plane, flying over the same ocean Mills introduces us to in the beginning. The sea is just as chaotic, just as much a force of nature to work with. But there’s a freedom she feels in, at least for now, being able to see it for what it is and admire the view.
20th Century Women is now on Netflix.