C’mon C’mon
Directed by Mike Mills
Running time: 1hr48 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Joaquin Phoenix and Woody Norman star in C’mon C’mon
C’mon C’mon threatens us with a premise we’ve seen a thousand times before, and aren’t in a hurry to see again: a feckless, unattached adult is forced to look after someone else’s child for a while, and in the process learns they they themselves have some growing up to do. What a twist! Often, this pitch gives us films as insipid as Raising Helen. Sometimes, it gives us films as amiable as Baby Boom. And very, very rarely, it yields something as wise and kind and sorely tender as the latest from Mike Mills, a director who has made bittersweet emotional intelligence his trademark through films like Beginners and 20th Century Women.
C’mon C’mon extends Mills’ pet themes of the rewards and burdens of family care, and the occasionally overwhelming gulf between a parent’s responsibilities and their capabilities. This time, however, it’s not a parent at the film’s centre, but rumpled New York bachelor Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), a man whose deep and empathetic interest in children — he’s a travelling radio journalist, interviewing America’s school kids on their plans and projections for the future — has seemingly never overlapped with a desire to have his own. He’s got on well in the past with his young nephew Jesse (Woody Norman), but that connection has evaporated since he and his LA-based sister Viv (a marvellous Gaby Hoffmann) stopped speaking, driven apart by strain over their mother’s dementia. But when Woody’s mentally unstable dad has a breakdown, requiring Viv’s full-time attention, she has no choice but to ask her brother to step in and mind Jesse.
Cue a prickly clash of personalities that, yes, gradually softens into a closer bond. But Mills doesn’t trade in sitcom-style hugging and learning: his characters’ breakthroughs are hard-won, earned through hard conversations, patient listening and occasionally (okay, often) fucking things up. Mills has keenly perceptive sense of how children think and argue, ideally expressed in a remarkable, volatile performance by British newcomer Norman. His Jesse turns on a dime from cutely precocious to obtuse and aggravating, the way kids do — neither Norman nor Mills are concerned with us liking him all the time.
And he has a perfectly ornery duet partner in Phoenix, whose inspired casting is what keeps any potential sentimentality at bay: quietly, shamblingly human after the spectacular derangement of Joker, he plays Johnny with an inconsistent complicated history of care and affection woven into his slouchy body language and muted line readings. Johnny and Jesse do wind up looking after each other in C’mon C’mon, but not in a neat, pat, moral-at-the-end-of-the-story sense: the film leaves them and us with some healing left to do.
C’MON C’MON (2021) Written by Mike Mills | Shot by Robbie Ryan | Edited by Jennifer Vecchiarello
In cinemas now.