Mark Reviews Movies: C'MON C'MON

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 18, 2021

Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) captures life in voices and sounds. He's a radio journalist, assigned to interview children in various cities of the United States in order to understand their current joys and concerns, as well as their hopes and fears for the future. Those interviews make up the first element of writer/director Mike Mills' C'mon C'mon, a deceptively simple and straightforward film with a lot on its mind and enough heart to back up its ambitions.

That Johnny is a reporter isn't, perhaps, by accident. Here's a man who looks at and listens to people from a purely objective perspective. These people matter to him—but not as much more than part of his job.

One of the other aspects of Mills' screenplay involves excerpts from assorted literature—essays and children's books almost, if not, exclusively. Johnny stops to read them every so often, either to himself or someone else, and one of those pieces is an essay from the documentary filmmaker Kirsten Johnson, who relates an incomplete list of thoughts, beliefs, rules, and guidelines for how to see and handle people within a work of non-fiction.

To record people, either on film or on audio tape, is to acknowledge that their stories, their experiences, and their voices do matter. The reporter, though, only exists within that moment, and unlike the subject, the reporter has the freedom to leave at any moment. That imbues the reporter with a certain responsibility: to care for and listen to and relate with the subject deeply in that moment, as long as it may last.

That's what Johnny tries to and, from what we see, does do while interviewing these kids, who speak quite frankly about what worries them in the here and now, as well as for the prospects of themselves and humanity and the world in general. That's the end of Johnny's responsibility, though, and also from what we can tell, that seems to be the way the man prefers it.

It's not that he doesn't have connections in his personal life. Johnny loved and misses his mother (played by Deborah Strang), who adored and supported him, up until—and maybe within fleeting moments of—her slow death with Alzheimer's. He was once close to his sister Viv (Gaby Hoffman), but a series of struggles and misunderstandings and mistakes drove a wedge between the siblings some time ago. Johnny had a serious romantic relationship, too, which ended for reasons he only somewhat—or, if he's being honest with himself, completely—comprehends, and if he's being more honest with himself, Johnny regrets what happened and that absence a lot more than he's willing to admit.

That's the third and primary element of Mills' film, which takes this character, his professional objectivity, and his personal sense of denial and slowly strips them away (Robbie Ryan's black-and-white cinematography makes us think of the notion of bare essentials). By the end and by way of Phoenix's relaxed but considerably specific performance, we have a solid understanding of the man he was and no small amount of hope about the person he will become. It all begins, simply because he finally calls his sister.

She's dealing with a lot in her life—not that Johnny would really know it for certain, although he definitely does, since a lot of what Viv is dealing with is why the two became estranged in the first place. Viv's son is Jesse (Woody Norman), a curious and precocious 9-year-old, whom even his mother doesn't hesitate to describe as a bit weird (Norman's performance is endearingly natural in a role that easily could have gone wrong).

For one thing, the boy is a lot to handle. For another, Jesse's father Paul (Scoot McNairy), who recently moved from Los Angeles to Oakland, suffers from mental health issues (A kid's book in the family library suggests it's bipolar disorder, and Mills, as becomes the trend whenever Johnny stops to read something, includes montages of the characters' lives within the passages from the book). He's struggling a lot at the moment, and as she has in the past, Viv wants to go to Paul to help him. Could Johnny come to L.A. and watch Jesse for a few days while she's away.

Johnny, who hasn't seen in nephew in years, becomes Jesse's primary caretaker for those few days, which stretch longer as Paul's condition worsens. The man, who doesn't have and doesn't seem as if he wants children, quickly has to learn to essentially be a parent. The boy, who is a lot to handle generally and is even more so with all this current confusion and uncertainty, goes between making it incredibly easy for his uncle and making it almost impossible for Johnny.

All of this is pretty straightforward, as Johnny and Jesse play, joke, bicker, argue, and generally bond in L.A., in New York City, and in New Orleans, since the uncle still has a job to do. The sweetness of some moments—such as Johnny reading stories to his nephew, Jesse wanting to sleep next to his uncle, or the kid imitating the man he loves and admires by picking up his recording equipment—is undeniable and genuinely touching. The frankness of others—such as Johnny's conversations with Viv, who explains how much she hates herself for sometimes being annoyed and frustrated with her son—shows that Mills possesses a deep understanding of and endless sympathy about the contradictions of parenting.

The rest of the story features plenty of contradictions, too: Viv and her own parenting (as well as her relationship with Paul), the way Johnny tries to hide himself in life but speaks freely to an audio diary, the various pieces of reading and how they're all about paradoxes (One on motherhood is especially illuminating), and the content of those interviews. Mills, his crew, and the cast (including Molly Webster, a veteran radio journalist, playing Johnny's colleague) did conduct these interviews with real kids in these cities. There's an admirable, optimistic wisdom to what they reveal, even amidst some trying and troubling circumstances. Mills is smart not to make direct comparisons to the fictional story, although Jesse is in some ways a reflection of what we hear.

C'mon C'mon tells a humble tale but weaves it with ambitious ideas. The payoff to its thoughtfulness is purely and considerably emotional.

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