Less than two months ago, at the Cannes Film Festival, director Joachim Trier offered up a beautiful rumination on life without children in the form of The Worst Person in the World, a warm and generous romantic comedy. Now, at the Telluride Film Festival, filmmaker Mike Mills has debuted C’mon C’mon, a wistful look at adults coming to terms with the presence of kids in their lives. It is equally as heartfelt and wise as The Worst Person in the World, though it takes a more earnestly sentimental approach.
For one thing, there are a lot of cute kids in the movie. Joaquin Phoenix, familiarly rumpled but sweet for once, plays Johnny, a radio producer who is traveling the country interviewing children about their hopes for the future. That motif, of real kids opining about the nature of things, is threaded throughout Mills’s film, reminding us of the perspicacity, variance, and universal similarities of little ones (and not quite as little ones) across America and beyond. But there is, at the center, one main kid: Jesse, a little boy with a big mind who is temporarily placed under his uncle Johnny’s care when his mom, Viv (Gaby Hoffman), leaves town to look after her bipolar ex-husband, Paul (Scoot McNairy).
Jesse is played by the preternaturally poised, but not overweeningly precocious, Woody Norman, who fluidly, inventively reacts to Mills’s scenarios and suggestions, and those of the adult actors in his company. Jesse is a scamp and a worrier, annoying and endearing, content to cuddle back into the comforting folds of pampered kiddie life while also yearning to stretch his gaze out and understand the larger world rushing at him. So he is, in most ways, a typical kid, a jumble of questions and energy, whom the childless Johnny must learn to manage and understand during their time together.
We’ve seen plenty of films in which an independent person is suddenly saddled with a child; it’s become a hoary film trope, sometimes used effectively, but very often in service of the most basic themes. Raising kids is difficult, grownup sacrifices must be made—but valuable lessons are learned.
What Mills does so ingeniously in C’mon C’mon is approach that triteness head-on. This is exactly that kind of movie, and it knows it. Johnny loses Jesse in a store! Jesse asks awkward questions about Johnny’s personal life! And Jesse, at times, wouldn’t you know it, seems to be the one raising Johnny. Aware of all that formula, Mills takes the time to specify what it might mean for these particular people. He peppers his complicated, credible conversations with idiosyncratic detail. Characters react in ways that real humans might when faced with the weary difficulties of being alive, the struggles of tending to yourself and to others. Mills makes this genre feel new and insightful, as if he’s one of only a few filmmakers who has tackled the complex dynamic between adult and child.
Mills has said that C’mon C’mon was inspired by his relationship with his own kid, just as Beginners was about his dad and 20th Century Women about his mother. Those earlier films are sensitive, often moving visual and aural collages. C’mon C’mon is that too, but it carries Mills’s filmmaking up to a new plane. He eschews the most overused of his visual patterns, and does not, as he sometimes has in the past, force any of the film’s profundity. Instead, he lets it gently, organically lilt out, softly building toward an emotional conclusion that speaks to truths far greater than the discrete topic of child rearing. When the meaning of the film’s title is revealed—I won’t spoil it here, and maybe even couldn’t—it is as if some cloud has broken and we can, briefly, see the plainer reality of being. In, of course, an understated, human-scale way.
The film is shot in lush black and white (Robbie Ryan did the cinematography), bringing the quotidian beauty of the places visited into sharper contrast. Johnny and Jesse travel from Jesse’s native Los Angeles to Johnny’s New York, and then to other people’s New Orleans (the film also opens in Detroit), each location getting lovely, honest assessment. A score of murmuring pianos and other sweetly plaintive sounds, by the National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner (who also did the compositions for Cyrano, a musical that premiered here at Telluride this year), gives the film an extra dimension of cozy ache.
Phoenix and Norman have a winsome rapport, while Hoffman delivers some of the film’s best lines as Viv patiently coaches Johnny on the improvisations and impossibilities of parenthood from afar. As she guides them through, Johnny and Jesse become a steadfast duo, moving through Mills’s amiably meandering film in lovely tandem, and as the conduits through which we in the audience may begin to understand our own senses of ourselves in the world. The film is, yes, about what it means to help raise a child. But it is also, in some grander and more diffuse sense, about what it is to consider the whole continuum of life, the (hopefully) unending cycle of generations pulling one another along.
To know that there are young people in the world discovering and processing everything anew—and that there will be ever more young people doing that after them—offers both terrible and comforting context for our lives. What Johnny and Jesse arrive at in C’mon C’mon is particular, and Mills ends his film with a discrete promise made, with quiet power, just between them. But there is much to be drawn from the film for anyone who may themselves be reeling in the confusion so common to our condition. We have, it turns out, learned things, we have wisened, matured, taken some hold of the chaos and stared it in the face, experienced it, grappled with it. To talk to a child—innocent and curious and still forming—may be a quick reminder of what we’ve gained. But there is our own assessment to be done, too, a hard-won appreciation of all the questions we’ve asked of the world and, bit by bit, had answered.
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