In an homage to Mike Mills’ style of highlighting snippets of books, pictures, and movies that are meaningful to his characters, I want to begin with a quote from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that perfectly describes Mills’ body of work:
“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
On the surface, Beginners, 20th Century Women, I Am Easy To Find, and C’mon C’mon are simplistic movies. They don’t have twists that inspire hundreds of “INSERT MOVIE HERE Ending Explained” articles. There are no robots or alien invasions or world-ending natural disasters. No Easter eggs, overbearing symbolism, or hidden meanings. Mills’ movies are about people. People who look and feel like someone you know, or someone who is just like you. While the films don’t feel large-scale, Mills treats emotions as big, loud, and deserving of the spotlight.
Mills has described two of his feature films, 20th Century Women and Beginners, as love letters to his mother and father, respectively. His most recent feature, C’mon C’mon, was written about his child and the fear, excitement, and confusion that come with being a parent. I Am Easy To Find is a short film that was made to accompany The National’s album of the same name. It chronicles the life of a woman from birth to old age.
There is a tenderness in Mills’ movies that took me aback the first time I saw 20th Century Women. That was my first Mills film, and the gentleness and care felt so genuine that I forgot I was watching a movie. It felt more like a family’s home video. There’s a lived-in quality to these movies, like slipping on your favorite, well-worn sweatshirt. It doesn’t feel like it should be possible to replicate such a homey feeling for mass consumption in a movie. There is an authenticity in all of Mills’ works that never feels fabricated, and I am continually astounded by his ability to create such pure emotion.
What I find most admirable about Mills’ movies is that they all appear to be love letters to people in his life. No matter the movie, there’s an insistence in Mills’ scripts that the audience be allowed to fully see the person each of his characters is. It’s yet again another way Mills balances the good and bad of life through a lens of the complicated people who make up this planet. He’s not interested in showing off a perfect person. He wants you to see someone he loves for all that they are and prove that perfection isn’t necessary to be loved.
Mills’ way of seeing people as the sum of their parts allows for a depth of character that goes beyond what can be achieved in most movies. Why they dyed their hair red, what books changed their life, the carpet they threw up on, the music that shaped them, the wooden bunnies they whittled, the sound of their father’s voice, their cigarettes, the dresser drawers that were more of a stable home than they’d ever known, the well-worn books that lived on the bedside table, the dolphin balloons that hovered over their bed as they drew their last breath. Letterboxd’s description for I Am Easy To Find is “a life in one hundred sixty-four moments.” The short film is mostly silent, the story told through subtitles and images. One hundred sixty-four moments meant to encompass Her (Alicia Vikander) entire lifetime. It’s easy to see the distillation of a life into moments as sad, but there’s beauty in seeing the summation of a human being.
I have a friend who only likes to watch movies with happy endings. She’s heard me talk about 20th Century Women a lot and, when it popped up on a streaming service, she wanted to know if she would like it. I told her honestly that I thought she probably would, and then she brought up the ending. Was it happy? I said yes, in a way. She ended up watching it and thought the ending was sad. I asked why, and she said it was sad because Dorothea (Annette Benning) dies at the end. I asked if she didn’t think it was beautiful that Mike Mills loved his mom so much that he made an entire movie about her. Wasn’t it beautiful that he was able to see his mother for all she was and love her so much that he put time, effort, and energy into creating an ode to the childhood she gave him? What is love if not the attention we pay? What is life if not all of it? The contradictions, the anguish, the joy, the heartbreak, the love.
Allowing the audience a glimpse of many different aspects of his characters’ lives is a valiant attempt at celebrating the totality of life. This meaningful, futile effort is said best in the final voiceover from Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) in 20th Century Women: “I will try to explain to him what his grandmother was like, but it will be impossible.” A person’s life, the mess of memories and experiences that shaped them, cannot be fully explained. But we try. Stories live on, art is created, memories are cherished, but nothing will ever paint the picture of this person in their entirety. Heartbreaking in the way that loving someone always is; there never seem to be enough words, feelings, or time to sum it up properly.
Part of what is so soothing about Mills’ films is his reverence for the things that society has said make us weak. It’s radical to put honesty, compassion, and openness at the forefront of his work. To have no interest in lies, scandals, or larger-than-life figures, and instead focus on the quiet honesty of everyday life. To celebrate the way we try to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. In C’mon C’mon, Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) is looking after his sister’s (Gaby Hoffmann) kid, Jesse (Woody Norman). At one point, after struggling with communicating with Jesse, Johnny Googles “how to talk to a kid.” In a different movie, one that doesn’t share the same deep respect for agency and feelings, this would be played for laughs. Instead, Mills is celebrating the ways we try to connect with and understand the people we care about.
There’s kindness in attempting to understand a life that is different from yours. 20th Century Women’s teenage Jamie is gifted with feminist books from housemate Abbie (Greta Gerwig). He takes to the feminist books immediately, even getting into a fight with a group of boys at the skate park because Jamie calls them out on their exaggertations about sex. When Dorothea is cleaning the cut on his face, she asks what the fight was about and Jamie replies, in the most serious, sincere way, “clitoral stimulation.” While played more for laughs than the Googling scene in C’mon C’mon, it’s still Mills exemplifying his belief that people are at their best when they are trying to learn about the world.
In Beginners, Hal (Christoper Plummer) is a newly out gay man in his 80s. He spent most of his life in the closet, and Hal is now experiencing a brand new world. After spending a night out at a gay bar in LA called Akbar, he calls his son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) to talk with him about the type of music that was playing. Music as a means of connection and disconnection is a recurring theme in Mills’ work. In 20th Century Women, Abbie gifts Jamie a mixtape full of songs that she wished she could have heard as a teenager because she believes they would have made her a “happier and more realized person.” At the same time, Dorothea and William (Billy Crudup) listen to Black Flag and Talking Heads, trying to make sense of the contemporary music that sounds foreign to them. I Am Easy To Find has Her growing up and using music as a means of remembering her childhood, dancing through her grown-up home the way she used to in her childhood one.
Using music as a way of bridging generations and barriers is quite fascinating because a lot of people use music knowledge as a means of gatekeeping. “Die-hard fans” believe that in order for someone to call themselves a fan of a musician or band, they must know every minuscule detail about them. Instead of believing there are certain standards or requirements to enjoying something, Mills’ characters revel in the discovery. There’s pure joy on Hal’s face when Oliver tells him that Hal was listening to House Music and he jots it down to learn more about it. Every dancing scene in 20th Century Women is effervescent, the different dancing styles of the different generations blending together to share in a moment. The least pretentious thing someone can do is unashamedly enjoy something, and time after time, Mills showcases that.
Living alone for the entire pandemic (so far) has had its share of pros and cons. Truthfully, I felt a bit like Oliver and Arthur (Cosmo the dog) from Beginners when I walked my tiny Chihuahua mix, Frankie, around our one-bedroom apartment. I didn’t realize it then, but I was showing her the patio that would never see friends, the pull-out couch that few visitors would sit on, the kitchen that would never host dinner with family or friends, the small world that belonged to only us. At times, it felt like she could speak to me and we would have silent conversations, mostly about the fire alarm that always seemed to go off at the worst time, the vacuum cleaner she’s still afraid of, and how she needs to make friends with other dogs. Like Oliver and Arthur, we were lonely and isolated, but in the end we made the best of it.
There’s a warmth in Mills’ movies that burrows into your chest and makes you feel like you’re among loved ones. They’re unpretentious and genuinely interested in making a chronicle of the world we’re growing up in. That tells us freedom and growing up aren’t something with an age limit — we can continue to learn and grow forever. The only way to really waste this one and only life of ours is to bottle up emotions, to ignore the way we feel, to not tell people how we feel about them. This mindset is what Johnny sets out to instill in Jesse in C’mon C’mon. He acts like he’s grown-up and okay with the instability of his life on the road with Johnny and away from his mother, but Jesse is far from okay. He’s stressed, anxious, and misses his mom terribly. As much as he’s enjoying the cross-country journey with his uncle, he craves his life at home with his mom and dad. Johnny encourages him to let loose, to shout, to say exactly how he feels. After some prodding, a yell erupts from Jesse’s small frame, “I am not okay and that is a perfectly reasonable response!”
Watching these movies about emotions and loved ones in a time of unfathomable isolation was cathartic. A forcible readjustment of what has meaning in my life. I left a job in Los Angeles that left me exhausted and overworked for a job that gives back to the community in a small town outside of DC. In LA, I was spending three hours a day commuting to a job I didn’t even like. I was wasting away. I was soulsick and I didn’t even know it. But here, in this one-bedroom apartment with my dog, things were changing.
My world had been reduced to an apartment, secluded from friends and family. Hundreds and thousands of miles away, appearing in my room in little Zoom squares. And in this isolation, I was kept company by Mills’ body of work. I wanted to emulate his unpretentiousness, his love for feelings, his love for people, and his love for this world. I saw that as my only path forward. I couldn’t see any of the people who mattered to me in person, but I could tell them what they meant to me. It’s clunky and awkward in the beginning because that level of sincerity isn’t often expressed, but it should be. It’s a gift to tell someone how much they mean to you, and it affects you as much as it affects the person you’re telling. I may not have spent the past few years exploring different countries, but my world still felt big and beautiful because of the people I was sharing it with.
As I walked out of the theatre after seeing C’mon C’mon (one of the first movies in years that I didn’t watch on my TV at home), I felt the urge to listen to Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive” from Company. What begins as a song about the annoyances of sharing your life with someone (they ruin your sleep, sit in your chair, hurt you too deeply, etc.) turns into a celebration. Sondheim takes all those “annoyances” and twists them into acute ways to be aware of being alive. Suddenly, having someone sitting in your chair and ruining your sleep is a thing to be desired, because it means you have someone to share your life with. And it’s a beautiful thing to share your life with people you love, in all the different definitions that word holds. That is the essence of Mike Mills. A life spent “feeling, big, small, scared, at ease” is a life well spent.
