It takes a "20th Century" village to raise a young man

Is there an actress more deserving of an Oscar than Annette Bening?  Not on American shores, anyway.  In 20th Century Women, Bening plays Dorothea Fields, a woman who had her son, Jamie, at the age of 40, and is now raising an intelligent teenage boy on her own, but not without difficulty.  Enter Abbie Porter (Greta Gerwig), a young woman with a penchant for photography and pink hair dye, and Julie Hamlin (Elle Fanning), a rebellious, oversexed teenager who likes to sleep in the same bed as Jamie, but without the hanky-panky.  The mother asks Abbie and Julie to help raise her son in all the right ways, and the result is, of course, not without complications, but with the right amount of clever and honest humor, as well as acute insight into human nature.

The movie may as well be the unofficial sequel to Bening's 2010 film, The Kids are All Right; the southern California setting and the strong motherly love is present in both films, and Bening delivers an Academy Award worthy performance in each.  Billy Crudup, who plays the handyman William (and unsuccessfully tries to romance both Abbie and Dorothea), looks as if he stepped into this movie straight from Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous (both films are set in the 1970s), and his shaggy, long hair and retro mustache indicate a strong resemblance between the two characters.  20th Century Women is that rare, honest movie about the difficulties of raising a child in a vastly changing world that is more about its characters than plot.  There is movie talk and then there's real talk; writer/director Mike Mills writes the latter kind.
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