A little kid and some very big questions

    C'mon C'mon speaks its own language, a movie about questions that can't be answered and the man and boy who are stuck trying to deal with them.

    Director Mike Mills introduces us to Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), a disheveled, preoccupied man who volunteers to help his sister (Gaby Hoffmann), a woman who's struggling to take care of her nine-year-old son (Woody Norman). Hoffmann's Viv also is trying to keep her bipolar husband (Scoot McNairy) from totally derailing during one of his crises.

   Mills (20th Century Women, Beginners) seems less interested in  mental illness than in how adults and children communicate. How does one talk to a nine year old who raises the subject of abortion and who wants to know why his uncle isn't married?

   Given its focus on the adult/child relationship, C'mon C'mon easily could have been overwhelmed by sentiment. It's not. Credit Phoenix who may be constitutionally unable to do warm and cuddly. He makes it clear that Johnny might be as lost as his nephew. 

    Throughout the film, Johnny can be seen working on what appears to be a radio project. He asks a diverse variety of children what they think the future will be like and records their answers. He also records his reactions to their answers.

    Shooting in black and white, Mills punctuates his story with unexpected views of the cities in which Johnny finds himself, principally Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and New Orleans. 

    Johnny, who hasn't seen his nephew Jesse in more than a year because of a conflict with his sister, first meets the boy in Los Angeles, where the boy's harried mother faces numerous challenges. 

    Mom leaves Jesse in Johnny’s care when she travels to San Francisco to seek help for her husband. When Johnny has to return to New York for work, he proposes taking Jesse with him. 

   Viv initially resists but she has little choice but to allow Johnny to travel to New York where Jesse helps him record the natural sounds of the city. He's opening the boy to the larger world, but also maintaining a distance from Jesse. Johnny doesn't try to shape everything that Jesse encounters.

    Not surprisingly, Johnny must convince Jesse that he's safe with an uncle he hardly knows. To complicate matters, Jesse has ways of getting on adult nerves, launching ceaseless barrages of questions and observations.

    Mills places Johnny’s interviews with kids throughout the movie. He dedicates to "D-Man" Bryant, a nine year old who Johnny interviews and who later was killed. The kids are real and give the movie a documentary flavor.

   With unruly hair and a bit of a gut, Phoenix conveys the confusion of a man who seems to be turning to children to find answers that have eluded him, and in the end, the story gets under your skin with its  collection of awkward conversations, adult anxiety, and testing behaviors from a kid whose world has been shaken.

    The film owes much of its success to cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who gets close to the film's children without intruding on them. He creates a world that feels both naturalistic and unfamiliar, just the right laboratory for this kind of cinematic experiment.

    Norman gives one of those kid performances that makes you wonder how Mills obtained it. Jesse seems entirely unaffected -- even when he's being self-consciously shrewd. And like most kids, he can be both endearing and, yes, annoying.  Jesse has yet to learn the art of self-censorship.

   The brief encounter between Johnny and Jesse captures the kind of intimate breakthrough that's possible when crisis strikes and a great gap of vulnerability opens, presenting itself as a possible moment of  grace -- at least when viewed in retrospect.

A look at women of the last century

Annette Bening occupies the center of a rich, anecdotal movie.

The house in Santa Barbara, Ca., constantly is being renovated. Its owner, a 55-year-old woman with a teen-age son, rents out rooms. The tenants include a mechanic who's a little long in the tooth to be called a hippie, a young woman recovering from cervical cancer, and a teen-age girl who occasionally slips into the house to sleep with the owner's son. By this I mean, she actually sleeps with the owner's son, forcing the boy to subdue his raging hormones as she looks for a safe place from her sometimes promiscuous exploits.

If you were around during the 70s, this all may have a vaguely familiar ring -- loosey-goosey social arrangements that approximate the intricacies of family: a single parent who often find herself at a loss when it comes to child rearing, sexual exploration and an overall sense of being too harried to search for deeper meaning.

Dad? He's not in the picture, having left for New York to start a new life.

That's the environment that director Mike Mills creates for 20th Century Women, a movie that manages to create a feeling for how life felt in 1979.

Normally, that might seem too narrow a gauge to hold our interest, but Mills has made a movie dominated by the shambling flow of the jangled lives of the women who populate it.

The result is rich, funny and warm -- although about three-quarters of the way through you may find yourself wondering whether Mills will be able to bring all these ingredients to some sort of a boil.

If that never happens, there are plenty of compensatory moments along the way: When the car of the owner of the house catches fire in a parking lot, she responds by inviting the firemen to dinner. And when her son points out that this is not exactly a normal response, she can't understand why her behavior might be considered odd.

Annette Bening gives the movie's anchor performance as Dorothea, a cigarette-smoking mother who winds up parenting a teen-age son (Lucas Jade Zumann) rather late in life. Unsure how to handle the young man, Dorothea seeks help from her cancer-conquering tenant (Greta Gerwig) and from Julie (Elle Fanning), the girl who becomes a near-constant visitor.

Supposedly based on Mills's own upbringing, 20th Century Women benefits from the actresses who grace it. Playing an aspiring photographer, Gerwig brings a mixture of confusion and vivaciousness to the movie, and Fanning perfectly captures the incipient world-weariness of a young woman whose sexual behavior has out-paced her emotional ability to deal with it. Fanning's character is a mass of contradictions; she's exploring her womanhood before even leaving the backpack stage.

Needless to say Dorothea's experiment doesn't entirely work. After Jamie goes clubbing with Gerwig's character, Dorothea wistfully muses that she'll never see that side of her son, a teen-ager trying to negotiate a separate social world for himself.

It's possible that the other actresses were inspired by the gifted Bening, whose Dorothea presides over the house, tries to maintain her composure and allow her son a degree of freedom he hasn't really sought.

In his best role in a long time, Billy Crudup plays a mechanic, the man in the house who tires to keep his poise. He, too, seems to be stuck in an emotional limbo.

Finding his way proves difficult for young Jamie, whose life is guided by three formidable but sometimes floundering women. We're told the story through Jamie's eyes.

Enjoyable in pieces -- and I don't mean that as a slam -- 20th Century Women makes a simple request: It asks us to spend some time with these appealing characters. They engage us in a series of gestures and responses that, like life itself, can charm, amuse and confound.

A gay father and his straight son

Christopher Plummer brings charm to Beginners.

Beginners has received lavish praise in most quarters. I wish I shared the enthusiasm of many of my colleagues, but I found the movie a mixed achievement, best when focusing on the relationship between a straight son (Ewan McGregor) and his gay father (Christopher Plummer); weakest when dealing with the son's burgeoning love affair with a French actress (Melanie Laurent).

Alternating between scenes in which McGregor's Oliver pursues a relationship with Laurent's Anna and flashbacks to Plummer's character's final years, the movie doesn't dig deeply into either situation, suggesting more than it dramatizes.

Here's the twist: Plummer's Hal didn't come out until his wife of 38 years passed away. Hal was 75 when he began openly exploring the gay life, pursuing his gayness with personal gusto and organizational frenzy. He hosts gay movie nights, gay letter-writing sessions (protests mostly) and other activities that revolve around his long-hidden sexuality.

To its credit, Beginners is not a story about Hal's hypocrisy. Within the context of Hal's repressive times, his behavior made some sense. His wife, Georgia (a wonderful Mary Page Keller) knew Hal was gay before they married. She thought she could change him. By the time she realized she couldn't, Hal and Georgia had established a life together, which they both liked.

Besides, Mom developed a set of sardonic defenses to cope with the situation. For my money, she's the movie's most interesting and least explored character.

In what amounts to its central irony, Beginners has Hal contracting lung cancer soon after leaving the closet. He's most alive at a time when he's dying, maintaining a relationship with a joyful younger man (Goran Visnjic).

Director Mike Mills, who previously directed the indie hit Thumbsucker, includes some gimmicky touches: insertion of old photos and panels from a cartoon series on which Oliver's working. Oliver provides a narration that stresses the peculiarities and similarities of the different time periods the movie covers. There's even a talking dog -- or at least one whose thoughts are projected on the screen with subtitles.

Oliver takes over Hal's Jack Russell terrier after his father's death, an event that has already transpired when the movie opens. That leaves Oliver to tell the story in flashbacks as events trigger memories of his father's recent death.

McGregor does a fine job portraying an emotionally guarded character who doesn't know quite what to make of his dying father's gayness.

For me, the love story between Oliver and Anna produced as many yawns as sighs. Previously seen in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, Laruent is an interesting actress, but her character -- a woman who also has father issues -- serves mostly to show that Oliver can bring himself to the brink of commitment without actually going over the edge.

It's interesting, though not vital, to know that Mills lived through the movie's main situation, only learning that his father was gay after his mother died. It's more important to know that Beginners is good-hearted, and it certainly benefits from the quiet abandon and humor that Plummer brings to the role of a man who's determined to enjoy every moment he has left.

If there's a compelling reason to see Beginners, Plummer provides it.