Earlier this summer, I went to a screening of C’mon C’mon (2021) at the Paris Theater in New York, where Mike Mills spoke afterward about the way he works with actors. He described a process that relies heavily on improvisation and gives performers considerable autonomy, rather than asking them to hit every emotional beat exactly as written. I already liked the film, but hearing Mills talk about his process gave me a clearer way into what I find so moving about his work. Watching 20th Century Women (2016) and Beginners (2010) afterward, I became more conscious of how much honesty comes from that looseness. His characters rarely feel arranged to prove something. They hesitate, contradict themselves, misunderstand what they want, and occasionally become funny at the exact moment another filmmaker might insist on profundity.
That quality matters because contradiction sits at the center of Mills’s films. His characters want independence while desperately wanting to be cared for; they understand other people better than they understand themselves; they can love somebody and resent them at the same time. Parents prepare children for lives that will inevitably take them away, while children rebel against their parents only to discover how much of them they have carried forward. Mills never treats these inconsistencies as flaws that need to be resolved before we can understand someone. If anything, his films suggest the opposite. Loving another person means learning to accept the contradictions you cannot solve in them, while knowing that they will eventually become someone you did not anticipate.
That idea is perhaps clearest in 20th Century Women, where Dorothea’s great problem is that she loves her son Jamie but no longer knows how to imagine what it feels like to be him. Her solution is both generous and absurd: she recruits Abbie and Julie to help raise him, hoping they can provide the parts of his education she fears she cannot. Sex, feminism, punk, emotional openness and the changing expectations of masculinity all enter Jamie’s life through people Dorothea brings closer to him. She wants him to become independent, but she also wants to supervise that independence, and there is something very Mills-like in the fact that these two desires are allowed to coexist without the film forcing one of them to win.
The contradiction gives the film its particular understanding of parenthood. Dorothea is trying to prepare Jamie to live without her, which means that success will eventually look a lot like losing control over him. There is almost an anticipation of rebellion in the way Mills presents their relationship. Jamie’s separation from his mother is not a dramatic betrayal waiting to happen; it is built into the very act of raising him. Dorothea seems to understand this before he does, and much of the sadness of the film comes from her recognizing that the person she knows so intimately is already becoming somebody she will never entirely understand.
This is also why the film’s nostalgia feels so different from the usual period-film nostalgia. Mills fills 20th Century Women with music, photographs, cigarette smoke, cars, punk records and voiceover, but he is not simply asking us to wish ourselves back into 1979. The period detail is vivid because the film is acutely aware that the period is gone. Again and again, Mills interrupts the present tense of the story to tell us what will happen to these people later: where they will move, who they will marry, when they will die. We watch them living inside moments whose disappearance has already been announced to us.
The voiceovers make this especially moving because they constantly remind us how late understanding arrives. Dorothea cannot know the adult Jamie while she is raising him, just as Jamie cannot fully understand Dorothea while he is still young enough to need her. The knowledge they eventually gain about one another comes after the relationship has already changed. Mills treats this not as a failure of intimacy, but as one of its conditions: we are always trying to understand people who are changing faster than our understanding of them can keep up.
What keeps 20th Century Women from becoming heavy is Mills’s sense of humor. The film is full of earnest conversations about feminism, sexuality, music and masculinity, but it never allows its characters to become mouthpieces for those subjects. A conversation about clitoral stimulation becomes a household crisis; “the punk scene is very divisive” is delivered with the gravity of a political warning. These jokes work because Mills understands that intellectual seriousness and human ridiculousness are not opposites. His characters can believe deeply in an idea while also being embarrassed, jealous, horny, petty or confused. Their contradictions do not invalidate their convictions. They make those convictions belong to actual people.
Beginners pushes the same idea in a different direction. Oliver has spent most of his life believing he understands his father, Hal, only for Hal to come out as gay at seventy-five after the death of Oliver’s mother. The revelation does not simply add a missing fact to Oliver’s understanding of his father; it rearranges the person he thought he knew. Hal becomes, in Oliver’s eyes, both familiar and newly strange: the married man who raised him, the closeted man who spent decades denying part of himself, and the older man now throwing himself into a new relationship and a new community while dying of cancer.
What makes Beginners so affecting is that Mills refuses to let any one of these versions cancel out the others. Oliver knew his father, and Oliver did not know his father. Both are true. Hal’s coming out does not provide the neat retrospective explanation another film might use to make the past suddenly legible. It complicates the past instead. His marriage, his unhappiness, his love for his son, his late-life exuberance and his fear of dying all sit beside one another without being collapsed into a single interpretation.
Hal also remains contradictory after coming out, which is crucial. Liberation does not turn him into a tidy symbol of liberated living. He is still frightened, stubborn, hopeful and in denial; he is still learning how to inhabit a life he has wanted for decades and now has very little time to experience. Mills affords him the dignity of not becoming a lesson, and remembering Mills’s comments at the Paris Theater helped me see how much this quality depends on the looseness of the performances. Conversations in Beginners rarely feel like they are driving toward a predetermined psychological conclusion. People interrupt themselves, change emotional direction, and sometimes fail to say the thing the scene seems to be asking for. There is room for them to remain unresolved.
C’mon C’mon brings these concerns back to childhood, and in some ways makes them even more explicit. Johnny, a radio journalist traveling around America interviewing young people about the future, temporarily becomes responsible for his nephew Jesse. The premise gives Mills an excuse to listen to children, something his films seem deeply interested in doing, and Jesse becomes another Mills character who refuses to stay consistent long enough to become easily readable. He can be perceptive and unbearable in the same conversation, desperate for Johnny’s attention and then furious when he receives it, mature enough to recognize the adults’ anxieties but still too young to manage his own.
Johnny keeps trying to respond correctly, but the film quietly dismantles the idea that there is a correct response. Caring for Jesse forces him to confront the gap between being an adult and knowing what to do. He can be patient, tender and attentive, then become irritated or frightened a moment later. Jesse’s contradictions expose Johnny’s, and the relationship becomes another example of what Mills understands so well: intimacy does not make people simpler. It makes their complexity harder to ignore.
That is also why loneliness runs through all three films despite how populated they are. 20th Century Women takes place largely in a house overflowing with people; C’mon C’mon brings Johnny and Jesse into intense proximity; Beginners is crowded with relationships across different periods of Oliver’s life. Yet every character retains some private part of themselves that the others cannot reach. Mills does not seem to find this entirely tragic. There is sadness in accepting that another person will always remain partly unknowable, but there is also generosity in giving up the demand that they become fully knowable in the first place.
Dorothea cannot determine who Jamie becomes. Oliver cannot rearrange his father’s past until it makes perfect sense. Johnny cannot protect Jesse from every fear or confusion waiting for him. What they can do is listen, remember, stay close and occasionally get things wrong. That modesty is part of what makes Mills’s films feel so emotionally honest. They are not about finally understanding another person; they are about continuing to love them after realizing that complete understanding was never available.
I recently added Criterion’s Mike Mills box set to my own collection, and I suspect I like having it for reasons beyond simply wanting to rewatch the films. It feels like the kind of thing I want on a shelf because I want to be able to hand it to somebody else. There is something appropriate about that for a filmmaker so interested in what passes between people: stories, habits, anxieties, memories, ways of speaking, ways of loving.
Maybe I will return to the films often. Maybe the set will spend more time being lent out than watched. Either possibility feels right. These are films I want nearby not because they provide answers about parents, children, relationships or growing older, but because they resist the idea that people can be reduced to answers in the first place.
Mills’s films find their beauty in continuing to try anyway. Loving another person, in his world, means accepting that some part of them will always escape you — and choosing to remain interested in them nonetheless.
Thank you for reading.