Annette Bening Gets a Pep Talk from Jimmy Carter in First ‘20th Century Women’ Trailer
Although it’s been chosen as the Centerpiece Selection of this year’s New York Film Festival, precious little advance word has so far arrived about 20th Century Women, filmmaker Mike Mills’ upcoming awards-season drama starring Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, and Elle Fanning. But all that is about to change, beginning today with the release of the film’s first trailer (watch it above).
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For his latest, Mills — who previously wrote and directed the (rather awful) Thumbsucker and the (markedly better) Beginners — sets his action in Santa Barbara, 1979, where the “crisis of confidence” that President Jimmy Carter speaks about on TV resonates strongly with a family led by Bening’s matriarch. As the commander-in-chief talks about how material goods can’t fill the void inside Americans, or satisfy their “longing for meaning,” we’re presented with a bevy of alternately funny and sentimental snapshots of people looking miserable and alienated, dancing and twirling, and doing other things that might be right at home in a period-piece variation on American Beauty (featuring that film’s leading lady, no less).
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Aiming to deliver what appears to be a portrait of a dysfunctional family whose members are trying to find their way through life, love, and all manner of other screwy domestic circumstances, 20th Century Women will premiere at the NYFF on Oct. 8, and then arrive in theaters — just in time to qualify for year-end accolades — on Dec. 25.
Mike Mills’ ‘Beginners’: Watch a trailer:
