Five years after the noticed 20th Century Women, comedy-drama starring Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig and Billy Crudup, American director Mike Mills returns with C’mon C’mon (The very moment), a touching family fable filmed in black and white that we want to present as a less tumultuous version of the Mommy by Xavier Dolan, also because of the reflection that the feature film offers on the role of the mother. A role multiplied by that of sister, wife and daughter, here played by Gaby Hoffmann. At his side, Joaquin Phoenix, his first major role since Joker (Todd Philips, 2019), and young Woody Norman, the revelation of the film.
We see much less Viv (Hoffmann) on screen than his son Jesse (Norman) and his brother Johnny (Phoenix), but his presence is felt from the beginning to the end of this film, pretty and languid, but without lengths. Even if not much is happening there. It is a film which shows, which explains, without relying on the dramas of everyday life that punctuate the screenplay written by Mike Mills.
Thus, Joaquin Phoenix plays with tenderness and sobriety (quite the opposite of his last major role!) A character of documentary filmmaker or journalist on the radio making his sociological cord vibrate through the report which occupies him from the beginning of the story, a sort of portrait of American youth, their dreams and aspirations. Its subject is not really clear, and it does not matter: Mills does not bother with details in the composition of its characters, as if the reasons which had separated Johnny and his sister Viv (we will learn that it was the disease, then the death of their mother) mattered less than what allows their reunion a year later.
Viv has to come to the aid of her ex, who is far from home due to his declining mental health. Johnny, single and childless, offers to go watch over Jesse for a few days in Los Angeles, days that eventually turn into weeks and weeks. road trip, from the West Coast to his New York home, then for the rest of his report in Louisiana.
We will thank Mills for sparing us the clichés of the single man having to learn on the job the role of substitute father for a young child disturbed by the events. We rather follow two humans who discover each other, who seek to understand each other by sharing a little piece of existence.
Woody Norman brilliantly plays the character of a nine-year-old child, curious, sometimes inquisitive, with an unbridled imagination, who develops an interest in the microphone and the headphones of his uncle reporter, the audio equipment becoming for him a new window through which he observes the world around him and which will allow him to open up more to his family.
Jesse is funny, intelligent, occasionally temperamental, rightly short-tempered in the face of the situation that keeps him away from his parents. The chemistry between Phoenix and Norman (who steals the show from his elder brother here) pierces the screen and carries with a lot of lightness this almost banal story, but so endearing.