Remember Me
The cinema of Mike Mills tells stories of families of all sorts – those together, far apart, happy, hurting. With his latest feature C’mon C’mon, the filmmaker finds a way to hold on to the memories we have of those we’re closest to – and it gave Hannah Strong the tools to remember her own family in the process.
My grandma is dying.
Not in the philosophical, romantic sense, the Simone De Beauvoir, “From the hour you're born you begin to die” sense. She’s dying in the “Phone call from my mother, the day after my 29th birthday, telling me she might not make it to the spring” sense. The “Well, the oncologist said the cancer has spread to her brain and the membrane of her skull” sense. You don’t cure the illness she has; you just delay it, cling to the hope that spring will come, and with it, more time. We always think that there’s going to be more time.
Both Mike Mills’ parents died from cancer. He made a film about each one of them; Beginners, in 2010, based on the relationship with his father in the final years of his life, and then 20th Century Women in 2017, based in part on his childhood in southern California. It is in an artist’s nature to take the truth and turn it into something beautiful – or at the very least something that reaches some part of another person – so to extrapolate hard fact from Mills’ filmography would be unfair, but the deeply personal nature of his work is what makes him such a singular filmmaker; every film he makes feels like an articulation of intimacy many of us experience, but never quite know how to express.
Mills himself seems conscious of this collective ineloquence; each of his films concerns characters who desperately want to understand one another, touching from a distance until they’re able to find their way home.
In his latest feature, C’mon C’mon, Mills builds on the autobiographical nature of his past work, this time drawing inspiration from his relationship with his own child, as well as other parents and other children he’s come to know through fatherhood. The peerless Joaquin Phoenix plays Johnny, a radio journalist whose relationship with his sister Viv (Gaby Hoffman) is strained following their mother’s death from dementia. The pair drift back together when Viv requests Johnny’s help in caring for her son Jesse (Woody Norman) while she helps her estranged husband seek treatment for bipolar disorder; Johnny arrives in Los Angeles to stay with Jesse, and together they travel across the United States, forming a close bond in the process.
Watching Johnny and Jesse embark on their adventure, I thought about my grandma, and the trips we would take together when I was younger. Over the course of my teens, we went to London, Paris, Florence, Tuscany; places which seemed hopelessly exotic to me, only existing in films and novels. I would wear sundresses and pretend to be someone else, eating gelato for every meal and peering into the windows of shops above our price range. She would tell me stories about her childhood, about how she always dreamt of going to places like France and Italy, and how nice it was to have someone to do it with again.
Mills understands the time we have together is precious, more than we realise in the moment. Watching a street parade together or strolling through a park are small acts which become meaningful moments in C’mon C’mon. The emphasis he places on sound as an indicator of place speaks to the power of memory; it’s not just what Johnny and Jesse see, it’s what they hear - the birds in the trees, teenagers skateboarding, tourists on the boardwalk at Venice Beach - that permeates, transforming from perception to memory over time.
These things aren’t always easy to remember; they require focus, a sort of conscious slowing down despite the demands of the world, where a thousand things demand our attention at any one time.
When I slow down, I hear the tick of the clock my grandparents used to have in their hallway. The static hum of the television on mute; they always seemed to have the teletext on for some reason. The soft scratching sound as I dragged my nails back and forth across the fabric of their brown velvet three-piece suite, etching temporary patterns into the armchairs.
I’m close to my family, but we don’t talk a lot about things that have happened. Things that are happening. (I’ve often wondered if that’s why I write.) In C’mon C’mon, talking is a transformative act, but so is listening. As Johnny travels the country interviewing young people about their lives for his radio project, they articulate their hopes, fears, interests; the act of asking children to speak about these things and treating their answers with care and respect speaks to Mills’ care for people who want nothing more than to be understood, and part of the beauty of C’mon C’mon is in his incorporation of reality into a fictional space, asking the audience not only to listen to Johnny and Jesse, but to the real people speaking about their lives.
The inclusion of the interview segments within C’mon C’mon opens up the world beyond Johnny and Jesse, revealing the commonality of desperately seeking visibility within our lives. Everyone wants to be seen by someone. Everyone wants to be heard.
My favourite line comes when Johnny is recalling a conversation he had with Jesse, and repeats a question he asked him:
“Am I gonna remember any of this?”
There’s so much we forget as we grow older; names of old classmates, theme songs to television shows we used to watch, things we learned in physics classes. But we forget the bigger stuff too, more and more overwhelmed with the world around us, with the exhausting muchness of adult life. We have to fight to remember things, cling onto moments we might otherwise overwrite with the minutiae of the everyday.
The elasticity of memory in C’mon C’mon is most felt when Viv and Johnny discuss their mother’s death; each has a very different recollection of how things were. In creating the radio programme, and in recording tapes for both himself and Jesse, Johnny creates his own physical memories, insurance against human fallibility.
Since she got her cancer diagnosis at Christmas two years ago, Grandma has been working on a project, transferring all the VHS tapes she has from the past 30 years onto DVD. And she has a lot of VHS tapes; I’ve rarely seen her without a camcorder in her hand since I was little. In her office, which used to be her dining room, are dozens and dozens of tapes.
She’s rarely in them herself (she was always behind the camera) but sometimes you can hear her voice, narrating the scene. A birthday party. A caravan holiday on the East Yorkshire coast. Christmas dinner. Together they form a visual archive of my entire life so far; a way to remember when none of us can anymore, like the tapes Johnny records which commit the present to the future.
Knowing we will have to say goodbye to my grandma soon hasn’t made this living wake any easier or less bizarre. But C’mon C’mon helped me see the act of love that comes in remembering with another; in giving a loved one a way to remember you.
C’mon C’mon is playing in UK cinemas now.
Hannah Strong (@thethirdhan) is the Associate Editor at Little White Lies. She is currently writing a book about film and raising one beautiful houseplant. She considers both of these things as equally important.
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