A bracing feature of the just-wrapped New York Film Festival is the dominance of strong women. Either they're filmmakers themselves (Ava du Vernay with the galvanizing fest opener "13th" and Kelly Reichardt with cult favorite "Certain Women"); or they appear onscreen: Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams, Laura Dern, Lily Gladstone in Reichardt's "Certain Women." Annette Bening in "20th Century Women." Kristen Stewart in "Personal Shopper." Isabelle Huppert in a festival double feature - "Elle" and "Things to Come" - exudes female power in any film she appears in.
The least winning of these heroines is the usually impeccable Annette Bening in "20th Century Women" directed by Mike Mills. It's 1979 in Santa Barbara and Bening, a single mother, lives with her teenage son (Lucas Jade Zumann) in a sprawling, bohemian group house. On the plus side, the film is formally innovative. Mills slices and dices the narrative so it flashes forward, backward and all but tap dances, with the occasional voice-over doing a segue into another character's voice. Mills anchors art film antics to the story of a fraught relationship between mother and child.
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