Becoming a parent, says film director Mike Mills, fundamentally reorganised his sense of the world. “Being with my kid is so deep in every part of my life. It’s really interesting how it can be very intimate and small, putting someone to bed or finding where they put their clothes. Giving a bath. And at the same time, all the bigger issues of life are sitting there at the same time.”
Mills is married to artist Miranda July; their son Hopper is now almost 10, the same age as the moving force in his new film C’mon C’mon. “Hopper is the beginning, right?” he said in an interview with GQ. “I wouldn’t have done this film at all, at all, if I wasn’t a dad.”
C’mon C’mon is not, in fact, about a dad. Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, a single middle-aged journalist who works for what is clearly National Public Radio, making a documentary about what children across America think about the future. Phoenix’s Johnny is a bit scruffy, a bit overweight, amiable and decent. When family circumstances oblige him to step up to look after his nine-year-old nephew Jesse (Woody Norman) for a few weeks, he takes the boy to work.
Joaquin Phoenix and his young co-star Woody Norman in C’mon C’mon.Credit: AP
They go to New Orleans; they finish in New York. Everything is shot in luscious black and white by Robbie Ryan, Ken Loach’s regular cinematographer. Using black and white, says Mills, disrupts his stylistic naturalism –“Everything becomes like a drawing” – and thus less likely to be read as one of those Hollywood stories of children teaching adults how to live.
For Jesse, the trip is a huge game where he enjoys wielding his uncle’s microphone, recording noises the sand makes on the beach, while exploiting his inexperience to push past his habitual boundaries. Woody Norman is incredible, calling the shots from the start. He is English, but auditioned with a perfect American accent. Nobody knows how he did it. He never even seems to be acting. For Johnny, it’s exhausting. “I heard she had an abortion,” says Jesse of his mother, matter-of-factly. Johnny looks nonplussed. What is he supposed to say now?
“I do think there is an adult misconception that kids are innocent and kids live in, like, this sheltered world, and often I think the opposite is true,” says Mills. “We force upon them this idea that they don’t know everything.”
Johnny’s interviews are real; the team talked to children in unscripted sessions that lasted for 45 minutes to an hour, snippets of which intersperse the story. Their voices provide what Mills calls a “psychic setting”, suggesting the larger world outside the central story’s bubble of intimacy.
“They are perceptive, smart and in their home language, which I really love,” he says. That heterogeneity, that it’s not just my voice, and our voice, is a treasure to me.”
Effervescent though they are, there is a core of melancholy to these interviews. Their lives are just beginning, but they are already fearful for the world’s future. “But I think I would be more concerned if they didn’t show that level of sensitivity to the world,” says Phoenix. “As kind of heartbreaking as it was at times – and there were times where you just wanted to hug them and say it’s going to be OK – it felt more important that they had strong feelings about their lives or the world than feeling disassociated or disconnected. They weren’t lost in their fantasy of what the world was. They were in the experience.”
C’mon C’mon could hardly be more different from Joker, the last film he made, which won him an Academy Award for his malevolent, damaged killer. That had nothing to do with his choice to make it, he says firmly. Initially, he refused the offer; it was only after months of mulling over the script with Mills, reading all the roles and picking up on words or lines he felt didn’t work, that he found himself committed to it.
Phoenix (right) only took the role after months of discussions and revisions with director Mike Mills.Credit: Andy Kropa
“I didn’t immediately say ‘oh, I have to do this film, it feels very different from the last film I did’,” says Phoenix. “That isn’t my thought process. Any time I try to look for things and make decisions or deals, it never works out. I was just really fortunate. I got together with Mills and we started talking. We continued to talk and, in the end, we were talking on set and there were cameras.”
He met Woody Norman for the first time in the scene where Johnny comes to pick up Jesse at his sister’s house. Jesse has forgotten him; Johnny has to make an impression. From that day forward, they shot in sequence.
“So we were able to develop our relationship as we were filming, which of course mirrored the experience of the characters,” says Phoenix. “It was really an effective way, I think, to find what that relationship is. We didn’t have to define it in advance. We allowed it to come to us. Woody was so smart, he really understood his character. And Mills is so smart, he knows what he’s doing. So I just tagged along.”
The crisis that throws together uncle and nephew is not of anyone’s making. Johnny’s relationship with his sister Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) took a beating and is still bruised some years after their mother’s death, but he spontaneously offers to help out when Viv’s former husband Paul (Scoot McNairy), who has bipolar disorder, careers into another breakdown. It falls to Viv to look after him; there is a sense it always will. This is not the core of the story, but there is a convincing sense of the way mental illness reshapes the lives of everyone around it.
“It’s not like illness is something ‘over there’. It’s like we’re all on a spectrum of well to not-well, able to live in a positive space or not, and no one’s ‘normal’. In our lives we have all kinds of different people who are on different courses of what’s going on inside their minds. So it just felt like part of the diversity of the family,” says Mills. McNairy shaped the character, as he says “in such an authentic, respectful and not at all presumptuous way … He brought such intelligence and care to everything he did as that character.”
Less clear in his memory are his reasons for making Johnny a radio journalist. One prominent American critic was dismissive of the film on the grounds that it was peopled with highly educated people who were such losers they had chosen jobs where that education earned them hardly anything. In a sense, he was right: these are Mike Mills’ people. “I’ve always wanted that job, so maybe I was secretly auditioning,” he says. “This American Life, shows like that, have been such a big influence on me, and that job looks so rad and fun to me – and I had this idea of all these kids from all over the place giving their views on the world. It started with me and my kid in a very small, intimate space – and then it expanded.”
C’mon C’mon is now showing.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.