C’mon C’mon (2021)

Posted on January 21, 2025 by 4 Star Films

I was thinking about how although Joaquin Phoenix has steadily become one of the most admired actors at work in film today, I don’t necessarily enjoy him or closer still I’ve never felt a kinship for him when he’s onscreen. Ethan Hawke, Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, even Leonardo DiCaprio have offered performances where I sense their humanity and empathize with them.

I forget Phoenix’s capable of the kind of mundane naturalism that also defines a certain mode of acting. C’mon, C’mon is a reminder he can be a rudimentary person, a normal human being, and when he’s playing Joker or Napoleon, it’s not better just different (Why does everyone have to be eccentric? It’s okay to be normal too).

Mike Mills’ stylized black and white movie follows a radio journalist named Johnny (Phoenix) who is enlisted by his sister (Gaby Hoffman) to watch over her 9-year-old son Jesse (Woody Norman) as she attends to a family emergency. He’s an unattached working professional who’s hardly equipped to be a caregiver, but who is?

It’s a learning experience for both uncle and nephew as they get used to each other in Los Angeles. The movie takes them all across the country as Johnny conducts interview with youth across the country. Jesse becomes his boom man learning what it is to do sound.

Those of a certain generation will know about Art Linkletter and “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” Johnny and his team seem to give us an update on this; sometimes adolescents have a wisdom we would all do well to tap into for simple, clear-sighted lucidity about the future. From time to time, sans the coarser language from the adults, it’s a Mr. Rogers movie. There’s a mild sense of wonderment and an appreciation of what the younger generations can teach us.

They have ways of asking the most searching and honest questions. Jesse questions why his mom is away. Johnny explains she had to check in on his father (he’s a composer going through a nervous breakdown). Why does his dad need help? It’s not an easy answer that’s cut and dry. And suddenly you appreciate the tightrope walk it is to be a parent and also the unprepossessing honesty kids maintain.

Adults are fractured and imperfect often hurting the ones we love. Divorce, the problem of evil, why bad things happen to good people, adults struggle with these issues for most of their lives. Kids are not immune to any of this and are affected by it all.

C’mon C’mon is not so much a road movie as it is about impressions and impressions in particular about familial relationships. Brother and sister hold a two-way conversation for most of the picture from different states keeping a dialogue going. It provides a very loose framework.

With The Velvet Underground acting as an auditory transition the story shifts to New York. It’s more Noah Baumbach than Woody Allen but the West Coast, East Coast juxtaposition is real, and it plays well in the movies. Meanwhile, New Orleans offers up its own unprecedented aesthetic to the patchwork.

Otherwise, the film takes an observational approach as uncle and nephew experience life together. It’s not a raw-raw, grab-life-by-the-horns pump-up piece; it’s smaller, from the ground up about moments and the kind of trifles you catch if you stop long enough to appreciate them.

I’m still trying to decipher if there is enough here for a conventional movie, but of course, I answered my own question because this is not a movie you get every day. It just needs to find the right audience and Mike Mills no doubt has a tribe of followers ready and waiting.

In a particular interview, a young man is asked what happens to us when we die. He offers up that he and his mother are Baptist so he believes in heaven. Pressed further he says he imagines it as a meadow with one big tree where you lay on the grass with the flowers and stare up at the sun relaxing; it wouldn’t be too hot.

The interviewer marvels that it sounds beautiful. Yes, it does. There’s no agenda or politics or vanity. The response feels so genuine. Does anyone remember what Keanu Reeves said in response to the question of what happens when we die? After a pause, he answered, The people who love us will miss us very much…I feel like we’re all searching for those shards of wisdom.

One of my favorite bands actually has a deep cut that’s called “C’mon, C’mon” and the lyrics go like this:

So c’mon, c’mon, c’monLets not be our parentsOh, c’mon, c’mon, c’monLets follow this throughOh, c’mon, c’mon, c’monEverything’s waitingWe will rise with the wings of the dawnWhen everything’s new

These words don’t speak to Mike Mills’ movie precisely, but in an impressionistic way, I can tie them together in my mind. There’s something generational about it — this youthful sense of wonder and optimism — and the desire to spur others on.

When I hear the phrase C’mon, C’mon, there’s a playfulness welcoming someone else in, whether it be into a kind of life or an uncertain future, even a game of tag or a bit of make-believe. C’mon, C’mon is an open hand. I want this kind of posture.

Because there is a not-so-subtle difference between childish and childlike. I want the latter for my life. Actors, directors, writers, creatives, I feel like they never quite lose this spirit at their very best, and it’s something worth fighting to hold onto. Sometimes our youngest members can give us so much if we have the humility to learn from their example.

3.5/5 Stars

20th Century Women (2016)

Posted on July 30, 2017 by 4 Star Films

In his noted Crisis of Confidence Speech, incumbent president Jimmy Carter urged America that they were at a turning point in history: The path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest, down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom. It is a certain route to failure.

This also serves as a viable entry point into Mike Mills’ intimate, pensive eulogy, 20th Century Women. This is a film on the verge of so many things. It frames its story in the context of the time and the people that existed in one particular moment. Mills floods his canvas with natural light but also paints it with bold colors and plants us in this world that’s somehow tangible and present while still only being a memory to look back on.

It’s 1979. Nixon is slowly fading. Reagan is coming with his conservative boon. You have the Talking Heads. You have hardcore punk. Feminist novels and the woman’s movement. Skateboarding down the empty Santa Barbara roadways. It feels less like a time of change and more of a moment on the brink of something new.

But this very self-awareness in the era is provided by the characters who live within that context because this is their life, these are their memories, and they connect them together delving into the past and soaring forward to all that is yet to come. They recount the world they know through matter-of-fact voice-over to match the images that undoubtedly play in their own heads. This is for them. Namely a son and his mom, Dorthea and Jamie. There’s is a generational difference but not so much a divide.

Dorthea (Annette Bening) is an eccentric, dynamic, empathetic woman who cares deeply about life and others. She believes in each individual person’s rights and volition–you might even say she’s progressive in some ways. But she’s also a mom and a woman bred in a different age. Her son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) makes a point of the fact that she’s from the Depression.

Giveaways include her chain smoking habit, a penchant for Bogart, and a predilection for show tunes. She was an aviator and draftswoman in a male-dominated world. But She came out of a time where the community was expected to look after everyone and she searches out the same framework for her son because he’s of a certain age.

If you were pressed to pick out the story’s inciting incident it might be the moment where Dorothea gathers the instrumental women in Jamie’s life around her kitchen table to enlist their help. Because the men around him either don’t resonate (Billy Crudup as William) or they only make their presence known on birthdays (namely Jamie’s father).

She takes a near death experience to mean he’s going through his adolescent phase and she doesn’t believe she can be all things for him anymore. As she notes later, they are better suited for the role because they get to see him in the world as a person. She will never get that. Oh, the heartaches of parenthood–being so invested–while simultaneously trying to be hands-off.

And so in some sense, her tenant Abbie (Greta Gerwig) and their teenage neighbor Julie (Elle Fanning) make a concerted effort to press into his life. Julie is the one who sneaks up through his window sometimes, not to sleep with him, though they often share the same bed, for mere companionship, someone to feel safe around and to talk to. Because he’s someone she knows can be trusted amid the fray of highschoolers.

In one particular sequence, Elle sits on the bed her eyes looking sullenly at Jamie as she tries to talk through their relationship. She concludes, “I think I’m too close to you to have sex with you.” In one sense, it’s touching because it shows that their connection goes beyond this physical act that all the kids are doing, she holds too much respect for him, but it also points to the sorry state of affairs when something like sex is seen as dirty and degraded. That’s part of what she is wrestling with. That and the fact that her therapist mother tries to conveniently label her every action.

Elle Fanning leaves a startling impression casting herself in this film in a light that in one sense is the prototypical edgy, angsty teenager but there is also an undeniable vulnerability and genuine caring quality there that steeps her in unknown depth. That top layer is nothing new but that latter aspect is a testament to Mills’ characters.

Meanwhile, Gerwig provides her exorbitant supply of charismatic energy and panache that allows her to hold some of the most memorable scenes in the film in comedic terms and yet she also proves that there still is a certain tenderness in the red-haired, photography-loving, punk listening, new age modern woman, Abbie.

At the behest of Dorthea she tries to invest some of her artistic spirit into Jamie’s life, showing off the punk scene, introducing him to seminal feminist texts, and helping him to be comfortable around women but, of course, he’s more comfortable than most which is a sign of a certain amount of maturity. In fact, he impacts these women as much as they speak to him and that’s a testament to everyone involved, all flaws aside.

Even if Jamie is, in truth, our main character, perhaps a stand- in for Mills or for us, this film succeeds in crafting stalwart female characters with actual contours that are worth dissecting and with inherent worth denoted by their actions and what they care about.

I don’t know a great deal about Mike Mills but watching a film like 20th Century Women I feel like I know him better–not all of him certainly–but there are pieces here that are no doubt personal and give us a slight view into his experiences.

It’s intimate and there’s an unquestionable amount of vulnerability in his story that must be admired for its sheer honesty. It comes off as purely genuine and real. Because the bottom line is the fact that it never runs on agenda. It never tries to overtly get us to think something or feel something else. If it comes to any overarching conclusions at all it’s that life can be hard and confusing and the same goes for people.

Each one of us can come off as a complex enigma. Even the ones we know and love. It’s possible that we will never know and love them as much as we wish we could. It’s possible we cannot help them or guide them as much as we would like. Still, that’s okay.

For some, this will be a maddening, rudderless picture but to each his own. However, if I may be so bold, 20th Century Women is the kind of film I would want to make–a film wrapped up in its cultural moment in a way that feels so authentic–where the events playing out even if they’ve been made cinematic have real resonance for me as a human being.

Yes, it’s the kind of effort that won’t be received by everyone but a film so very personal rarely is. A film like this you don’t necessarily make for other people anyway. You make it for yourself and the ones you love and leave it at that. This is a love letter.

3.5/5 Stars