I’ll Remind You of Everything: The Films of Mike Mills

Filmmaker Mike Mills was inspired by his own father’s coming out late in life to shape a clear-eyed look at how our family histories quietly inform all of our relationships. When Hal (Christopher Plummer, in an Academy Award–winning performance) reveals he is gay at the age of seventy-five, his son, Oliver (Ewan McGregor), gets the chance to know a more vulnerable version of his father. In the second of the film's two interwoven time periods, Oliver meets Anna (Mélanie Laurent) soon after his father’s death, beginning a romance that is informed by the risks and honesty of Hal’s final years. Balancing dry humor and DIY charm, Beginners extends an uncommon generosity to its characters—still figuring themselves out at all stages of life.

The changing social currents of the 1970s sweep through an unconventional Santa Barbara, California, household in Mike Mills’s tender, wryly funny reflection on his own upbringing. Annette Bening shines as Dorothea, a strong-willed professional and single mother who, unsure of how to connect with her teenage son (Lucas Jade Zumann), turns to two younger women: politically engaged photographer Abbie (Greta Gerwig) and restless, rebellious high schooler Julie (Elle Fanning), who both initiate him into a world of punk rock, sexual discovery, and emerging feminist thought. Animated by love for its idiosyncratic characters, 20th Century Women is a story about a young man’s coming of age that is just as much about the extraordinary women who guide him.

Having excavated his past in Beginners and 20th Century Women, Mike Mills looks toward the future with this compassionate, cathartic story about listening to and learning from the next generation. Shot by acclaimed cinematographer Robbie Ryan in luminous monochrome, C’mon C’mon follows radio journalist Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) as he volunteers to look after his sensitive nine-year-old nephew, Jesse (Woody Norman), while his mother, Viv (Gaby Hoffmann), Johnny’s sister, deals with a personal crisis. As Johnny’s work takes him across the country—from Los Angeles to New York to New Orleans—he forges a bond with Jesse that proves surprisingly transformative. Turning his own experience of fatherhood into soul-enriching art, Mills offers a graceful meditation on caretaking and the connections that sustain us.