20th Century Women (2016)

directed by Mike Mills

Erika Veurink

“Having your heart broken is a tremendous way to learn about the world.”

This is a line from Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women, not a journal entry from your long forgotten high school journal. It’s spoken by Dorothea (Annette Bening), a middle-aged mother lovingly waving her Salem cigarette toward her fifteen-year-old son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann.) The year is 1979. The place is Santa Barbara, California. It’s President Carter’s monotonous drone and Talking Heads and cotton striped T-shirts. The film is the director’s second, and charming in its reckless stabs at greater meaning. It’s a story of a time, a memoriam to a cultural disposition, and it reminds me of a very particular ex-boyfriend.

The year was 2017. The place was New York City. It was any given Saturday night on Second Avenue and “Who’s your favorite Beatle? Please don’t say John.” and wearing our parents’ hand me downs. I was twenty-one and bored out of my mind. He was studying film and wore “fashion hats.”  He opened the door to his apartment for a Halloween party in one, shirtless under a vest and said,“Howdy.” I hoped more than anything he knew the Wes Anderson film my best friend and I were referencing in our own costumes. In our matching red hats, we drank Miller High Lifes and made our way up and down the spiral staircase a dozen times before getting in a cab back downtown. She and I recapped the night the next morning. Having a witness was half the fun. He called and asked if I wanted to “maybe, you know, catch a film later?”

As much as my attraction to him registered as trite or indulgent, I loved the way his arm slouched into mine at the movie theater. That Saturday night, I worshipped our matched strides as he and I ran up the stairs into the middle of the dance floor, fur jackets on, beers in hand. It was three songs before we realized we were sweating and draped our thrifted coats on the deer head hanging from the wood-paneled wall. “We could walk uptown or to Brooklyn or take the ferry to Staten Island,” he offered as we burst onto the street for a smoke. Horns honked and the glorious haze of Sunday morning at 2 am set in. The air felt supercharged with meaning. He put his hands directly on my shoulders, like a boxing coach, and said, “We could go anywhere.”

He spoke in a cadence that led me to believe that every third phrase he used would later be recorded in his Moleskin. Aphorisms abounded between lots of loaded silences. I would nod understandingly, always letting the sound bites waft a bit for emphasis. The feeling in 20th Century Women is strikingly similar. “Wondering if you’re happy is a great shortcut to just being depressed,” Dorothea muses casually. “It’s always about the mother,” muses 17-year-old best-friend-slash-stand-in therapist, Julie (Elle Fanning). It’s a movie chock full of musing. These lines punctuate the dialogue like string lights in a shared bedroom. That’s to say, obviously but endearingly.

The first time I watched the movie in theaters, I ran to the car after to write them in my own notebook. All this diary talk and references to hidden pasts add up, considering Mills’s work has always been highly autobiographical. His first film, Beginners, is about his father’s end-of-life discoveries of self and sexuality. It’s an incredibly funny film with moments of stumbled-upon poignancy. Oliver, the son of said dying father says at one point in the film, “You can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”

The style doesn’t lend itself to believability or likability in the characters, but does feel true to the way we all remember times of our lives. We are master editors, creative geniuses when it comes to the way things were. In 20th Century Women, Jamie learns to hold a cigarette “like a guy” from his love interest. They wander a honey-lit creek, rock to rock, refining his form. The first time I smoked a cigarette, I lit the wrong end and coughed up loose tobacco in a grocery store parking lot. But in the movie of my life, a curly head boy would twist it right side around, light it with a flick of his Zippo, and tell me something about how life is as fleeting as cigarette smoke and all we have is art. The camera would pull out to reveal his shrugging shoulders, the happenstance sunset.

Mike Mills reveals much of his past in his movies, but that’s what being captivated by an aspiring artist is like. It’s supposed to feel too intimate, even clunky at times. And like revisiting my journal entries from when I was in my early twenties, unevenly in love with the costumed cowboy/aspiring director, it doesn't always hold up well. Instead of poems, we sent each other handwritten lists of our favorites movies, based on categories. We met at diners for their irresistible irony. We even broke up on a bus as a nod to my all-time favorite, The Graduate. While it was happening, it felt cliched, but when it was over, I missed it as if it were genuine.

It’s nearly impossible to recapture the way those moments felt, the supporting role New York City played or the green glow under neon letters on the border of Stuytown and Alphabet City. It was all important. Every detail was essential. And I know the lulls in conversation or the missed connections have been edited for clarity and for the sake of posterity. All that’s left of our romance is a couple of highlight reels. So it checks out that Mike Mills movies would lean cliched or nostalgic. 20th Century Women is a diary entry built into a monument. It’s a snapshot, a slice of honest-to-God life, set to the loving tone of remembrance. It’s a film that explores the way we tell ourselves the best versions of stories when they’re over, for the sake of beauty and for the sake of self-preservation. And who knows, maybe having your heart broken, specifically by a film student, is a border-line tremendous way to learn about the world, or at least the world as you remember it.

Erika Veurink is a writer living in Brooklyn by way of Iowa. She is receiving her MFA from Bennington College. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Entropy, Ghost City Press, Hobart, Literary North, Tiny Molecules, and x-r-a-y.