In late '70s San Bernardino, a Greatest Generation protofeminist, now a chain- smoking middle-aged long-divorced single mom with authority issues, Dorothea Fields (Annette Bening) is losing control of her fifteen-year old skate punk son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann). They inhabit her creaking Victorian manse which is under continual remodeling (Symbol Alert!). To make ends meet, Dorothea rents rooms to Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a brooding twenty-something hipster and recent cancer survivor, and William (Billy Crudup), a handyman, mechanic, and New Age seeker who can't accept the end of hippiedom and grow up. Joining this merry band is Julie (Ellie Fanning), a lonely pouting brat two years older than Jamie who hates her family (natch), sleeps around (a lot), and spends most of her free daytime hanging out at Dorothea's house and her nights in Jamie's bed (it's not what you think!).
Free spirits, let us call them all.
The tension comes from Jamie's emerging but directionless young manhood. Dorothea is a loving but incompetent parent, and the father has long since abandoned the boy. But at least she gets it that Jamie now needs more guidance than she can give him. William is too much a loser to be of any help, so she enlists Abbie and Julie to serve as Jamie's mentors (mentrices?). Julie asks the film's core question: "Don't you need a man to raise a man?" To which Dorothea (beating Murphy Brown by twelve fictional years) replies, of course, "No, I don't think you do." Well, let's see how that works out.
Abbie introduces Jamie to the fading punk scene and to feminist literature dealing mostly with female sexual satisfaction. The result is a lot of pointless anger, noise as music, and Jamie's growing obsession with — oops, I meant "awareness of" women's genital fixtures. To help him further along this path, Julie steals Dorothea's car, she and Jamie rent a motel room and, oh, you'll just have to see for yourself, won't you?
In weird first-person epilogues, the main characters all tell you how their lives will turn out ten or twenty years hence. Happy, married, and with children, mostly. The takeaway seems to be fundamentally conservative yet with more than a mere nod to feminism: traditional (the now-requisite adjective) marriage and family are the norm to which we snap back, even after periods and episodes of error and oddball experiment; yet feminism has taken some of the starch out of that stiff standard. And yes, because of it a young man becomes a better man, the "sensitive man" of certain feminist plans (see Mansfield, Harvey C., Manliness [2007]). Or maybe it's just that a parent's love makes up for most parental failings. With a little help from our friends.
And the house? Like Humphrey Bogart (a running allusion), it belongs to another, more self-certain age, an age Dorothea is trying to restore, if only in its outward forms, while her life itself is being rehabbed by the social, sexual, technological, and political constructions of the times.
Is it a comedy, really? Nah. More of a "sweet lost mood" pic in homage to the director's mom. The acting is completely convincing, though, so much so that you find yourself coughing and swatting the cigarette smoke away. Worth seeing, but without lasting effects.
Free spirits, let us call them all.
The tension comes from Jamie's emerging but directionless young manhood. Dorothea is a loving but incompetent parent, and the father has long since abandoned the boy. But at least she gets it that Jamie now needs more guidance than she can give him. William is too much a loser to be of any help, so she enlists Abbie and Julie to serve as Jamie's mentors (mentrices?). Julie asks the film's core question: "Don't you need a man to raise a man?" To which Dorothea (beating Murphy Brown by twelve fictional years) replies, of course, "No, I don't think you do." Well, let's see how that works out.
Abbie introduces Jamie to the fading punk scene and to feminist literature dealing mostly with female sexual satisfaction. The result is a lot of pointless anger, noise as music, and Jamie's growing obsession with — oops, I meant "awareness of" women's genital fixtures. To help him further along this path, Julie steals Dorothea's car, she and Jamie rent a motel room and, oh, you'll just have to see for yourself, won't you?
In weird first-person epilogues, the main characters all tell you how their lives will turn out ten or twenty years hence. Happy, married, and with children, mostly. The takeaway seems to be fundamentally conservative yet with more than a mere nod to feminism: traditional (the now-requisite adjective) marriage and family are the norm to which we snap back, even after periods and episodes of error and oddball experiment; yet feminism has taken some of the starch out of that stiff standard. And yes, because of it a young man becomes a better man, the "sensitive man" of certain feminist plans (see Mansfield, Harvey C., Manliness [2007]). Or maybe it's just that a parent's love makes up for most parental failings. With a little help from our friends.
And the house? Like Humphrey Bogart (a running allusion), it belongs to another, more self-certain age, an age Dorothea is trying to restore, if only in its outward forms, while her life itself is being rehabbed by the social, sexual, technological, and political constructions of the times.
Is it a comedy, really? Nah. More of a "sweet lost mood" pic in homage to the director's mom. The acting is completely convincing, though, so much so that you find yourself coughing and swatting the cigarette smoke away. Worth seeing, but without lasting effects.