Santa Barbara, 1979. Dorothea Fields (Annette Bening) is the matriarch of an unconventional family; she shares grand craftsman style home in a state of lovingly-tended disrepair with her teenage son Jamie (Lucas Zumann) and two boarders: Abbie (Greta Gerwig), an aspiring photographer recovering from cervical cancer, and William (Billy Crudup), a handyman with an interest in pottery. As in Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, the house represents its inhabitants—quirky, inclusive, and a little rough around the edges.

20th Century Women is a more-or-less autobiographical film. An account of writer/director Mike Mills’ experience as the son of a single mother. The film looks and feels a lot like Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), but without that film’s tremendous scope. 20th Century Women is simultaneously too ambitious, and not ambitious enough. It attempts to capture complex themes: aging, love, happiness, mortality; with insufficient means: the film is under two hours long and depicts just a single year in its character’s lives. Boyhood is an exceptional film because it captures the passage of time itself (the film was shot over twelve years using a screenplay that was periodically modified to reflect changes in the actor’s personal lives). 20th Century Women, which is comprised of an errant collection of dialogue scenes and vignettes, is anemic by comparison. Where Boyhood painted life in bold sweeping strokes, 20th Century Women can only manage a shaky outline. It is a film that acknowledges tragedy without confronting it; hints at disagreement but never depicts conflict; and talks about love without ever capturing its essence. 20th Century Women is a film unfulfilled, a movie that grasps at the profound but comes up empty-handed.

The film is divided into four chapters, each of which is dedicated to one of the film’s principal characters. Each chapter begins with a title-card that states the character’s name before transitioning to a brief and impressionistic montage of photos and archival video footage. Mills has stated that each of the characters is based on a real person (or a composite of people) and presumably some of the footage is authentic. The technique is something of a Mike Mills signature, it was used extensively in his 2010 film Beginners and it's an effective means of quickly adding depth and texture to a character or place. Other directors, notably Adam McKay in The Big Short (2015), have attempted to copy the technique but Mills remains its most inventive practitioner.

Unfortunately, the chapters do not entirely fulfill their purpose. They bleed, overlap, and wander so much that it’s not possible to distinguish one from the others. Perhaps if each chapter adopted a visual signature that reflected the nature of its subject—more handheld with Jamie, the adolescent, for example; or only static shots with Dorothea, who plays a more firmly rooted mother—the sensation of four distinct perspectives would be more clearly articulated. Instead, the chapters represent a missed opportunity to add structure, and hint at the film’s fundamental aimlessness.

20th Century Women relies on a selection of cultural touchstones: brands, bands, and books to position its characters within a particular social milieu (white, liberal, upper middle class). This is dubious practice in any case—a film shouldn’t rely heavily on objects or brands to represent its characters—but in this case the products serve a second and even more disheartening purpose. The references (Birkenstock, Talking Heads, second-wave feminist literature, etc.) seem to have been selected precisely because they are popular among the film’s target demographic. In other words, the film uses objects that posses cultural capital amongst a certain audience to broadcast its own credibility. The assumption being that audiences will identity with the products and then go see the movie—call it catnip for the NPR-class.

In the film’s epilogue, Mills (as narrator) laments the fact his son will never meet his grandmother. He concedes that it is impossible to capture his mother’s extraordinary spirit, yet his film attempts to do just this. The problem with 20th Century Women is that Mike Mills picked the wrong medium. The film’s meandering, lackadaisical style might have worked as a memoir but is poorly suited to screen. The success or failure of a given film owes less to what is said than how it is said: a great film depends less on content than delivery (this is why Hitchcock’s Rear Window is a brilliant and suspenseful film even though James Stewart never leaves his bedroom). 20th Century Women is too personal; Mills conflates his own attachment to the material with it being genuinely interesting to a wider audience. Watching 20th Century Women is like being shown somebody else’s family photos—it’s clear that the images have sentimental value, but that value is not easily communicated to outsiders. One must simply smile, nod politely, and try to not to appear too terribly bored.