Interview: Mike Mills on 20th Century Women

Acknowledging the influence of Fellini on his work and name-checking conceptual artists like Hans Haacke in his soft California drawl, Berkeley-born Mike Mills has clearly embraced the “art fag” label that his alter ego, young Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), struggles to come to terms with in 20th Century Women. A multimedia artist who’s designed CD covers, clothing, and skateboards as well as directed music videos, commercials, and feature films, Mills filters life through an art-school lens, and if he’s better than most of us at being unapologetically himself, perhaps it’s because he had good role models.

Mills’s last film, 2010’s Oscar-winning Beginners, was based on the unexpected ways in which his relationship with his father, Paul Mills, deepened after Paul came out in his mid-70s, relaxing into himself and opening up to his son in ways he never had before. In 20th Century Women, a loving tribute to his mother and the other young women and girls who helped raise him, Annette Bening stars as Dorothea, a gallant soul with a healthy contempt for conventional wisdom and a creative talent for carving her own path through life. As the film’s title implies, it’s essentially a character study of several people, but the stories of the five main characters are layered together in a nonlinear pastiche that shifts in perspective as well as in time.

In a conversation earlier this month at the A24 offices in Manhattan, Mills talked about why it was easiest for him to understand his mother by thinking of her as a trans man, how art school opened up his conception of what a movie can be, and why the ‘70s was a feminine decade in America.

Walking Dead recap: Season 7, Episode 8, "Hearts Still Beating"

This season's start was as bleak as any in The Walking Dead's history, but the show's midseason finale closed on a major note of hope. Tested by the fire of Negan's (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) sadistic dictatorship, Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and most of his core group wound up stronger than ever, determined to stand up to their tormentor—and to do it together. “Hearts Still Beating” ends on a shadowy figure who's spying on our survivors, the close-up of his (or her?) boots establishing that it's the same person who shadowed Aaron (Ross Marquand) and Rick on their supply run earlier that day.

Hidden Figures

Director Theodore Melfi's Hidden Figures sheds light on a little-known corner of history by outlining the stories of Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), and Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), three African-American women who worked at NASA in the 1960s. When the story begins in 1961, NASA doesn't yet have electronic computers, so it has to rely on people to calculate the mathematical data needed to successfully launch space missions. The open and unapologetic sexism of the time is reflected in the gender-stratified jobs: All the so-called “computers” are women, while only men get the more prestigious and better-paid jobs that involve using the numbers crunched by the women to launch rockets into space. And, since this is the Jim Crow South, the African-American computers all work in the same room, behind a door labeled “Colored Computers.”

Top 10 Movies of 2016

Here's my top 10 list for the year...

1. Fire at Sea
2. The Handmaiden
3. O.J. Made in America
4. Moonlight
5. Happy Hour
6. Manchester by the Sea 
7. 13th
8. Cemetery of Splendor
9. 20th Century Women (my interview with Mike Mills)
10. Fireworks Wednesday

... and my honorable mentions
Aferim!, Cameraperson, Captain Fantastic, Hell or High Water, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, The Lobster, Mountains May Depart, No Home Movie, Sworn Virgin, Tower

And here's Slant's list of the year's 25 best, which I contributed to.

Fire at Sea

The quietly intense Fire at Sea captures life and death on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, which serves as a crucial waystation for refugees due to its location between Africa and Europe. Director and cinematographer Gianfranco Rosi penetrates deep into the world of 12-year-old Samuele, a fisherman’s son whose daily life, which runs along a path laid down generations ago, seems almost completely untouched by the tragedies playing out a few kilometers away. When Rosi isn’t watching Samuele do things like make and master a slingshot or head into the brush for a tender encounter with a wild bird, he’s observing the process by which refugees enter a fenced-off holding camp on the island, shooting close-ups of loss-ravaged faces and vignettes about some of the trials they’ve endured. The bifurcation between their world and Samuele’s, a metaphor for the gulf between the dispossessed and the rest of us, might feel too on-the-nose if only it were not the awful truth. Written for Slant Magazine

The Founder

Michael Keaton has used his jittery intensity to play sympathetic villains in the past, in films such as Beetlejuice and Desperate Measures, but he's never been as odious as he is in director John Lee Hancock's The Founder. Keaton's Ray Kroc is an aw-shucks avatar of American capitalism, the kind of guy who will reach out to shake your hand and then rip your arm right out of its socket.

Bojack Horseman

Ah, Bojack. Will you ever learn how to get out of your own way? To tell you the truth, I kind of hope not, much as I want that for you, since the pleasure/pain of watching you stumble through life as a self-sabotaging depressive is so wincingly exquisite for its multitudes of meaning. Ending on that beautiful scene of Bojack watching mustangs run free and encompassing both the tragedy of Sarah Lynn’s death and the brilliant, almost word-free encapsulation of alienation and missed signals that was the “Fish Out of Water” episode, this season rode BoJack Horseman’s signature tone of psychologically acute surrealism to new emotional depths. 

Transparent

We got to know the Pfeffermans a little better this season as they learned more about themselves, making two-steps-forward-one-step-back progress on the parallel but separate quests for self-knowledge that make Transparent so addictive. A major focus of the season was on the difficulty of achieving true intimacy within sexual relationships, particularly if you don’t understand yourself well enough to know what you want. After alienating Vicki through typically selfish behavior, Maura (Jeffrey Tambor) tried something entirely new by hooking up with a man, while her children all did the approach-avoidance dance with past and current lovers. The family turned more to religion for answers too, showing an increased interest in the temple and putting their own spin on rituals like the Seder in the season finale. They may not ever succeed, but the Pfeffermans are trying as hard as any family on TV to obey the Delphic dictum to “know thyself.”

The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story

Twenty-one years after the O.J. Simpson trial surfaced a racial divide that came as news to many white people, America is once again grappling with shocking evidence of that divide. Maybe that’s why this year brought us two excellent serialized tales of the trial, O.J.: Made in America and this case study of how justice can be warped by forces like fame, money, racism, and sexism. The People v. O.J. Simpson uses reenactments of key parts of the trial and behind-the-scenes dramatizations of Simpson (Cuba Gooding Jr.), his “Dream Team” of defense attorneys, and his prosecutors to surface the central irony of his case: A man whose fame granted him special treatment by nearly everyone avoided conviction for a crime he almost certainly committed by claiming to have been framed by police who actually cut him extra slack. Examining those events through the lens of our slightly more progressive time allows us to see some things more clearly, including how shamefully Marcia Clark (Sarah Paulson) and battered wife Nicole Simpson were mistreated. 

Girls

 

The penultimate season of Girls was one of the show’s strongest, as the creators behind this often comic, always insightful exploration of late adolescence in the early 21st century gained confidence and skills along with their characters. The backlash against the show’s last two seasons probably has a lot to do with the fact that the first couple got more than their share of hype, but it’s also at least partly a reflection of our discomfort with the whiny, hipster-Brooklyn white privilege and ludicrously elongated upper-middle-class American adolescences of the characters themselves—and of a strong streak of misogyny expressed by disgust at things like the gloriously human imperfection of Hannah’s (Lena Dunham) naked body. But Girls’s role as a Rorschach test for our feelings about so many hot-button issues shouldn’t obscure the fact that the show gets so much right, portraying its characters and the world they inhabit in loving, living detail and with a knowing wink. Written for Slant Magazine

Jane the Virgin

Like its title character, sweet-natured, straight-shooting romance novelist wannabe Jane Villanueva (Gina Rodriguez), Jane the Virgin has a lot more going on than a casual observer is likely to give it credit for. That it has roots in Latin American culture is just one of many refreshing and distinctive things about a series that gleefully explores and explodes stereotypes about female sexuality. This season, Jane finally lost her virginity in a scene that was wonderfully anticlimactic, as she learned that having sex isn’t synonymous with having orgasms—and that the importance of a woman’s virginity may be a tad overrated. The college degree Jane is pursing this season in creative writing and her telenovela-star father’s (Jaime Camil) attempts to break through to an American audience provide more outlets for the show’s running dialogue on how to write an entertaining yet truthful story, which winkingly refers to the melodramatic elements—including drug lords, love triangles, and long-lost twins—that help make Jane the Virgin’s undidactic messages go down so easily. Written for Slant Magazine

Happy Valley

After a night on the town, Yorkshire police sergeant Catherine Cawood’s (Sarah Lancashire) protégée, Ann Gallagher (Charlie Murphy), drunkenly confesses that she believes God is just the best in all of us, and Catherine has more good in her than anyone else she knows. That sweet yet messily realistic scene (soon after her confession, Ann vomits) is typical of this series, whose genius lies in illustrating what it means to be a good person without being the least bit preachy. The acts of mercy Catherine is constantly engaged in are resolutely, sometimes even comically secular, like that night of drinking, which she orchestrated for Ann’s sake after noticing that the younger woman needed “cheering up.” But they’re often also wrenchingly difficult, like her battle to protect the grandson she’s raising from his psychopathic father, whose many crimes include having driven Catherine’s daughter to suicide. Her actions are always rooted in a profound moral clarity and loving acceptance of human weakness that’s inspirational without a hint of mawkishness. Written for Slant Magazine

Top 10 TV Shows of 2016

TV (including serial shows on platforms like Netflix and Hulu and Amazon) has been nipping at the heels of theatrical feature films for a while now, but this year it surpassed them. It's always hard to come up with just 10 movies for my top-10 year-end list, but it was way harder this year to come up with the top 10 TV shows. Thank goodness for honorable mentions.

My Top 10:

1. The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story
2. Atlanta
3. Bojack Horseman
4. The Americans
5. Jane the Virgin
6. Happy Valley 
7. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
8. Narcos
9. Transparent
10. One Mississippi

My honorable mentions:
Fleabag, Girls, Insecure, Lady Dynamite, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Orange is the New Black, Silicon Valley, Togetherness, High Maintenance, Westworld, Black Mirror, The Middle, black-ish, The Crown, The Good Place

And here's Slant's list, which I contributed to.

Walking Dead recap: Season 7 Episode 7, "Sing Me a Song"

The Hitchockian opening scene of tonight's episode of The Walking Dead, “Sing Me a Song,” makes clever use of Michonne's (Danai Gurira) inscrutability. Walking down an initially empty country road and whistling “The Farmer in the Dell” to attract her prey, Michonne is the epitome of the existentially alone Western hero she personifies more than anyone else in Rick's group as she sets a walker-lined trap whose purpose is disturbingly opaque. The close-up of the sword and walkie-talkie she leaves behind as she drags a body down the road is a particularly unsettling bit of misdirection: Is she planning to commit suicide by walker? And even if she's doing something else, like setting things up to make it look as if walkers got her so she can go underground, how long can she survive without that sword?