Butler's Cinema Scene

Lucas Jade Zumann, Greta Gerwig, Annette Bening, Elle Fanning

“20th CENTURY WOMEN” My rating: B

118 minutes | MPAA rating: R

In his 2011 film “Beginners,” writer/director Mike Mills presented a fictionalized portrait of his father, who at age 75 announced that he had cancer and, by the way, was gay, too.

With “20th Century Women” he does a similar service for his mother, delivering a funny and emotionally substantive look at an unconventional household of feminists in the mid-20th century.

Much as Christopher Plummer won a supporting actor Oscar as the father in “Beginners,” Annette Bening is gaining awards buzz as the divorced matriarch in “20th Century Women.”

Set in the ’70s, the film centers on 55-year-old Dorothea (Bening) and her 15-year-old son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann).

Dorothea is a curious case, a chain-smoking, mildly eccentric traditionalist in her personal life but a low-key crusader when it comes to social issues. (That conflict is reflected in the musical soundtrack, which pits the likable Talking Heads against the snarling punk of the Germs and Suicide.)

Dorothea lives in a big crumbling house undergoing perennial restoration. She’s got a hunky, laid-back boarder, William (Billy Crudup), who serves as carpenter, mason and auto mechanic.

There’s another renter, the henna-headed Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a blend of punk and hippie sensibilities who is undergoing a cancer scare.

And then there’s the young beauty Julie (Elle Fanning). Two years older than Jamie, she uses his bedroom as her refuge from an unhappy home life and a series of apparently joyless sexual couplings. At night she often enters through his second story window, scrambling up the construction scaffolding that surrounds the house.

Jamie is desperately in love with Julie (so are those of us watching the movie), but she keeps it platonic. She needs a friend and sounding board, not another young dude who wants to paw her. (“It was so much easier before you got so horny,” she sighs.)

Elle Fanning

Mills’ screenplay hinges on Dorothea’s realization that as a single mother there’s only so much she can do to mold her son. She has plenty of wisdom to dispense, both cryptic and sincere (“Having your heart broken is a tremendous way to learn about the world”), but what 15-year-old wants life advice from Mom?

So this offbeat den mother more or less arranges for Abbie, Julie and William to make a project of her teenage son. They can influence him, guide him. At the very least they can get him to read Germaine Greer and Betty Friedan.

Suddenly the kid finds himself with one real mother, two surrogates (one of whom he’s desperate to boff) and an undeniably masculine but hopelessly unfocused father figure (William doesn’t have to focus, since women throw themselves at him).

The film that emerges is often quite funny … and oddly touching.

There’s all sorts of yummy acting on display here. Gerwig, usually seen in flighty comedy mode, gets to mine a bit of her dark side (she’s also dead serious as a White House regular in the current “Jackie”). As Julie, Fanning mixes ethereal beauty with teen cynicism (it’s both sexy and sad); Crudup is tremendously amusing as the priapic (in a nice way) William.

But the picture is owned by Bening and Zumann, who deliver one of the best mother/son relationships in recent film memory.

These are performances that succeed as much for what is held back as what is projected. Mills’ setup could be played for sitcom shallowness, but here his two leads inhabit their characters with small gestures and moments that add up to an unexpectedly compelling film.

| Robert W. Butler