Complicated lives

Women are complicated—so complicated that there are books and films and music dedicated to navigating the intricate tangles of the female psyche. 20th Century Women (rated a well-deserved R for sexual material, crude language, and nude scenes) is one of them.

Dorothea (Annette Bening) is the film’s main complicated woman. At age 40 she gave birth to Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), then divorced the husband she never truly loved. The movie is set in 1979—an era still settling the dust of seismic social and political shifts—and the now-55-year-old Dorothea is a single mother raising a 15-year-old boy whom she understands less every day.

She enlists help from two women: Her cancer-surviving, punk-rocking, feminist tenant Abbie (Greta Gerwig) and Jamie’s best friend/unrequited love Julie (Elle Fanning), a Judy Blume–loving 17-year-old with mommy issues. Both agree to raise Jamie into “a good man”: Abbie loans him radical women’s lib books that coach him on physically stimulating women, while Julie teaches Jamie how to swagger and smoke like the guys she sleeps with.

But the one who really needs help is Jamie’s mother, in whom he senses deep unhappiness. By all appearances, Dorothea is a gregarious chain-smoker who snaps on denim overalls to renovate her fixer-upper Santa Barbara house. But Jamie wonders why she’s never found love, why she never reveals her thoughts and feelings, why she enlists other women to “deal” with him.

20th Century Women is not for anyone with the good sense to reject “menstruation” as a dinner topic (yes, that’s a scene). But it has a heartbreaking beauty and characters with complex layers that could inspire poetry and psychoanalytic essays. Yes, women are complicated—Jamie never truly grasps the mysteries that make up his mother—and the movie leaves it at that.