In 2010’s The Kids Are All Right, Annette Bening played a lesbian mother dealing with the crisis of her kids’ birth father re-entering their lives, and in Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women she portrays a fiftysomething Bohemian single mom Dorothea who is just trying to keep her life together, and her adolescent son intact in 1979 Santa Barbara, CA. Setting the tone of her mid-life mishegoss in the trailer is a speech by President Jimmy Carter who at the time preached, “We always believed that the days of our children would be better than our own, but we discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our long for meaning.” Helping Dorothea raise her son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) is the free-spirit who boards in their home, Abbie (Greta Gerwig) and Julie (Elle Fanning), a savvy and provocative teenage neighbor. The A24/Annapurna Pictures movie makes its premiere at the New York Film Festival in the Centerpiece Gala slot on Oct. 8 and opens limited on Christmas day. Bening currently counts four Oscar nominations for her turns in The Grifters, American Beauty, Being Julia and The Kids Are All Right.
