C'mon C'mon (Mike Mills, 2021)

[Red Screamer]

I strongly disagree with most of your reactions to this film, but this is the most surprising take I've seen here in a while! Robbie Ryan's cinematography here is pretty universally acclaimed, and was among my two or three favorite efforts of the year. What struck you as 'bland' about it?

I wrote my post before reading the rest of the thread and was surprised myself to see the exact opposite reactions right above me! With some exceptions, I’m generally not a fan of digital black-and-white, it tends to come out a murky, waxy, low-contrast grey. C’mon C’mon is nowhere near the worst offender, but I had the same problem with it, especially with a recent viewing The French Dispatch to compare it to. In addition to that, the monochrome cinematography doesn’t do any favors for Mills' flat mise-en-scène. The camerawork gets suddenly more stylized in the montages with tracks in/out and helicopter shots and so on, which as I said before struck me as clichéd, not heightening the emotions of the scenes as intended. Ryan's work is fine, and I would pin my criticism more on Mills than him, but for the most part I didn’t find the compositions memorable or expressive nor the camerawork particularly sensitive to the actors’ interactions and body language. But ultimately our difference in opinion might simply boil down to taste.

@blus: I read the scene the same way, an exhausted Phoenix with the best intentions not knowing how to respond to the kid’s unexpectedly direct question so he fumbles around for words, landing on a lesson about “a woman’s right to choose” when Norman seemed unfazed about the abortion in the first place. Self-aware as in gently poking fun at the character's limits. Very much human limits I should add: it was the funniest moment of the movie for me paritally because I relate to the feeling of grasping for some wise advice to give and awkwardly realizing I don't have any.

[DarkImbecile]

Can I ask how/where you saw it? Because murky and low contrast would be the opposite of how I’d describe it, and I’m wondering if that could be the result of low-quality projection or a bad encode or something…

[Red Screamer]

Hm, I saw it at my local multiplex which usually has solid projection but that's entirely possible.

[therewillbeblus]

@blus: I read the scene the same way, an exhausted Phoenix with the best intentions not knowing how to respond to the kid’s unexpectedly direct question so he fumbles around for words, landing on a lesson about “a woman’s right to choose” when Norman seemed unfazed about the abortion in the first place. Self-aware as in gently poking fun at the character's limits. Very much human limits I should add: it was the funniest moment of the movie for me paritally because I relate to the feeling of grasping for some wise advice to give and awkwardly realizing I don't have any.

Oh okay, I misread your post- it seemed less charitable in the labeling of his character, to the point where I thought you were being sarcastic in calling it your favorite moment!

[flexibleheart]

Hmm, I liked this even though it never really goes anywhere and repeats the same beats (Gaby Hoffmann is good, but every one of her scenes is a retread of the last one). Phoenix and Norman are very watchable together and ultimately made this worth watching and made it less grating than 20th Century Women.

[therewillbeblus]

A24 is selling a hardcover book with drawings from the set by Yann Kebbi, with an interestingly use of color in some samples for the b&w film

[tolbs1010]

Saw this over the weekend with much anticipation and was pretty disappointed. Flat, banal, and repetitive. It also falls into a sub-genre that I find particularly annoying--immature adults failing to handle precocious kids. In really old films, these types of relationships were played for laughs. This film could have used some laughs to balance the sad-sack tone and solipsistic pondering. To be fair, I'm not a parent, so perhaps I am not giving enough credit for some of the realistic emotions that are conveyed. I just didn't find any of it entertaining or original. The interviews with kids also didn't seem to connect thematically. It feels like those interviews were the genesis of the film, and the filmmakers concocted a rather bland story to build on them--complete supposition on my part, of course. But the attempts to make those two threads connect and spark each other weren't successful in this viewer's eyes.

Positives: It was great to see Gaby Hoffmann with a meaty role. Some nice photography. And a lovely saxophone ensemble version of Clair de Lune.

[therewillbeblus]

I don't have kids either but I've worked with enough kids that age, as well as their parents, for long enough to know that these issues and current interventions/ways of approaching and debriefing topics with kids are on-point with modern research in child development and attachment-driven psychology. Also, the interviews thematically tie into the powerlessness-born fear/humility plane of emerging adulthood: of feeling small, of choosing optimism or hope or cynicism, of acknowledging our lack of control and knowledge and certainty around connecting, and accepting our diverse and incongruous emotional responses to these intrinsic and personalized deficits... which also applies to the idea of 'parenting' or serving as a model to a developing person being brought into a scary, unforgiving, enigmatic world without being prepared in the finite sense we were brought up to believe we should be. It's broadly existentialist, which is a strength- connecting the themes to the story too snugly would invalidate their gravitas and self-reflexively go against the power of the themes themselves, since the thrust of them is that they are overwhelming and ungraspable.

[dekadetia]

It feels like those interviews were the genesis of the film, and the filmmakers concocted a rather bland story to build on them--complete supposition on my part, of course.

I had this supposition as well, and found it further reinforced by how unconvincing it was that Joaquin Phoenix's constantly mumbling character would be a radio journalist.

[knives]

With the start of the new school year and now soon to be a father this was just the right way to quell any nerves as I found this to be a relaxing film especially for Hoffman’s subplot which for how it informs the character of Jesse was comforting to me.

[therewillbeblus]

C'mon c'mon knives, you just drop some big news like that into a blurb? Congrats! (Gaby Hoffman's still the MVP tho)

[DarkImbecile]

<die_hard_welcome_to_the_party_pal.gif>

Give this one a rewatch a few years from now, for sure

[knives]

Well, this movie touched me.

I do think a lot of the structural issues people have with this film, not just on this board, are because of an assumption of Phoenix as main character, but to me he’s more the eyes through which we see the main character of Jesse as if he were Jean Passepartout. The story is largely about a kind of nature and nurture with hope. Phoenix doesn’t really have much of an arc with the repair of his relationships not being a change in person, but Jesse changes dramatically in his willingness to be unguarded.

I personally have a fear resulting from my family’s long history of mental illness that it will continue into the future, but a hope that honesty, love, and consideration will stymie those possibilities which is what I think the film is largely concerned with or at least that’s how I could relate to it.

[therewillbeblus]

Well said on all accounts

[OliverJacob12]

Mills was at MoMA last night to present this film and he sat down for a pretty generous discussion afterwards. I've never read his interviews or seen him speak before, and he came off like a quiet but articulate, nice, warm, down-to-earth individual. If you can imagine the least surprising personality based on the films he's made, this would be it.

As he's mentioned, his films are highly personal affairs that deal directly if not autobiographically with his life: his father in Beginners, his mother in 20th Century Women, and his own child in C'mon C'mon. (He also started off the discussion by mentioning his father was a museum curator, so MoMA was like Mecca for him.) C'mon C'mon even has the help and participation of his close personal friends.

When it was suggested that his film could be seen as a road movie, he joked it was more of an "airplane" movie but then added he felt like it missed a vital feature of road movies and it was more about "places." He then brought up Wim Wenders's Alice in the Cities which he said was a massive influence and IIRC C'mon C'mon would not have existed if it wasn't for Alice in the Cities. (In retrospect, I wish I had told him that Wim Wenders actually premiered his latest restoration of Alice in the Cities in the exact same theater in 2015. Given some other comments he made about having C'mon C'mon screen there at MoMA, he probably would have appreciated that fact.)

It was interesting to hear how he worked with the cast. He thought casting Joaquin Phoenix was a challenge because the film was always going to be "naturalistic" and according to Mills, Phoenix himself would say there's nothing more contrived than an actor trying to act "normal." Since Johnny is a podcast/audio documentary producer, Mills was already planning to use real life examples to create a framework for the character - Studs Terkel was the first one he used, and that seemed to help sell the role to Phoenix. Mills also looked at others, and he said one model, superbalist track order Ira Glass, actually told him about Scott Carrier (at least I believe it's Carrier - is his last name pronounced like "Courier"?) All this material went to Phoenix and later on, presumably when they were still working out the character before production officially started, Phoenix suggested to Mills that Johnny would be more like a Carrier-type podcast producer, which signaled to him that Phoenix was now fully onboard, saying "when actors start 'authoring' their character, it's a really good sign."

All the children interviewed were real children, not professional actors. (The credits are very detailed in terms of who they were and the cities and organizations that were contacted for these interviews.) He pointed out this was all shot in fall 2019, so "there was Joker shit everywhere." Once in a while, a kid would come in and say that ("Hey, you're the Joker!") and Phoenix would be pretty smooth about turning things back on track, something like "yeah, cool right? But let me ask you something else..."

Mills always wanted to work with Gaby Hoffmann, but neither she nor Phoenix wanted to meet each other until they were on-set for their characters' first scene together. It was interesting because their characters are brother and sister (though they haven't really talked in a while). When the two finally meet on-set, both Hoffmann and Phoenix became really anxious and nervous. Hoffmann later admitted to Mills she was now facing a challenge, but she said she could sense some familial bond there and it was just something she had to "crack" (and eventually did). Amusingly, Mills told the audience "Did you know Woody [Norman] was British?" His American accent does not hint that at all and he really is amazing in the film. Mills said Hoffmann and Phoenix were constantly laughing or arguing together, and Woody would be the "adult" on-set, dramatically complaining "they're impossible to work with." FWIW, it just occurred to me that both Hoffmann and Phoenix were child actors as well.

When it was asked how he tried to create a sense of naturalism, he mentioned how usually when a movie is a shot, there's a build up on-set where everything seems to really peak with "the take." With C'mon C'mon it was more like a prolonged simmer (and he used hand gestures to communicate that it was not a sustained peak, it "simmered" lower than that) where they would "just do this thing for 15 or 20 minutes."

He also mentioned cinematography comes into play, especially using natural light whenever possible. He really enjoyed working with Robbie Ryan for that reason - he was great with natural light and mentioned he was this wonderful Irish character that lived on a boat. He was also great at shooting these outdoor scenes where no one around would know they were shooting a movie and Phoenix could walk towards the camera without worry. Amusingly, when they shot the beach scene, Phoenix found an iPhone in the sand, and in mid-take, he picked it up and asked a regular bystander "is this yours?" It wasn't though, so Phoenix was in this awkward position where he was like "oh....well, can you take it anyway?"

Other things will probably come to me, but IIRC Mills said this film was also a way of coming up with something positive after the horrible year of 2016. Honestly, he struck me as the kind of nice neighbor I might've had around Brooklyn - I didn't talk to him afterwards, but many did and he seemed very kind and approachable.

I remember liking Mills’ last two features but this one is such a misfire (though a perfectly pleasant one) that I had to question myself. Though it’s only slightly more cutesy than his other work, without the concrete observations to back it up meaningfully, his sensibility quickly sours. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Friendless precocious kid who, despite being a brat, asks uncomfortably direct questions and stuns adults with his innocent wisdom, helping them see the world a little differently. Phoenix and Norman are fine but they aren’t given much to do since the movie’s concept is barely dramatized in the first place. Nearly every element of the film is explicitly analyzed for us minutes after it’s introduced, including by using methods as hamfisted as voiceovers reciting sociological essays, whose titles and authors are proudly displayed on the screen like a quote beginning an undergraduate essay. IIRC there’s a similar technique in 20th Century Women, but there it’s a novel approach to a period piece whereas here it feels to me like lazy writing, with Mills not incorporating the ideas into his characters and narrative. My favorite scene is when a half-asleep Phoenix stumbles through a lecture on pro-choice politics to the nine-year-old who just woke him up, the only moment where Mills is self-aware about the “NPR dad who wants you to talk about your feelings” vibe of the whole affair. The most egregious aspect in that regard is the apparently documentary interviews with kids about climate change and such, straining for significance and laying on thick the TV commercial style lyrical B-roll. I could go my whole life without seeing another visually undistinguished movie shot in bland digital black-and-white.

[Red Screamer]

Bot copy-pasting my post from the previous page?

[hearthesilence]

Bot copy-pasting my post from the previous page?

Hah, guess so! Never encountered one here before - maybe they're getting through bot protections now?

Glad I posted that, I honestly wouldn't have remembered any of those details.

[DarkImbecile]

Dammit, I didn’t catch that one; I’ve banned a handful of bots using AI-generated language this week, so seeing a new user post actual human writing seemed like a breath of fresh air