20th Century Women 4K 2016 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

The story takes place in the summer of 1979 in Santa Barbara. Dorothea Fields is raising her teenage son, Jamie, and trying to give him the very best. She draws her maternal wisdom from her relationships with two women: Abby, a photographer immersed in the punk movement who has returned to her family home, and Julie, a smart, mischievous 16-year-old and a friend of Dorothea’s son. Each of them plays a role in shaping Jamie’s journey into manhood.

Review 4K Movie

“Women of the 20th Century” is a promising title, and both “the 20th century” and “women” are significant and contradictory concepts, so you expect something epic in scale. That’s why it’s initially confusing that the film is literally about five people living in a small town and their relationships.

The film’s main characters are Dorothy, a woman in her fifties, and her 15-year-old son, Jamie. As a single mother, she wants to raise him to be a real man, but believes she can do so without a male role model. So she turns to the women closest to her—Julie, Jamie’s 17-year-old friend whom he’s known since childhood, and Abby, a woman in her early twenties who’s passionate about photography and other arts and rents a room in her house. They are the women of the 20th century—Dorothy, of course, too—but in her son’s own words, she is a child of the Great Depression, a major economic crisis, and the Second World War that followed, which coincided with her youth, so it’s not quite the same.

In short, the mother had conceived something in the spirit of “coming-of-age” novels for her son’s transitional years. And, of course, things didn’t go the way she wanted, mainly because she herself didn’t know exactly what she wanted. Dorothy is going through a personal crisis of her own, and the uncertainty of her life makes her see those around her as just as confused. The problem is, she doesn’t understand their confusion, and that confuses her even more.

The film contains so many beautiful “quotable” lines—sometimes literal quotes from various books—that it creates the impression the screenplay was adapted from a book, but in reality, that’s not the case. In reality, it is a tribute by director and screenwriter Mike Mills to the women who raised him—a tribute so subtle and beautiful that it seems to have come straight from fiction.

“20th Century Women” is a film with a fairly strong feminist undertone, and like other “-isms,” this theme is complex. But in my opinion, Mills has managed to create a cohesive statement by blending feminist theories with coming-of-age drama and punk rock, all wrapped up in a cozy indie aesthetic and nostalgia. It sounds a bit refined and saccharine, but in reality, it’s not.