118 minutes long so at least 18 to 28 minutes too long. Set in Santa Barbara in 1979. Annette Bening is a 55-year-old single mother with a 15-year-old son ... she's sort of a Bohemian Mom, doin' the best she can with a teenage boy, which isn't very good. She chain smokes which may explain why she looks older than 55 (Bening is in fact 59). She has a couple of boarders in her house, and they form a sort of weird "family." I fast forwarded from 20 minutes in.

There are some funny scenes... the "family" and some hippie friends watch Jimmy Carter's "Crisis of Confidence" speech, at the end of which someone says, "Wow, he is so screwed," which made me laugh. At the dinner afterward, the pretty punk tenant (Greta Gerwig?) leads the group in saying "menstruation" together, which I found amusing. But there's no way I could have sat through two hours of this at normal speed. Yellow rating for Boomers and very early Gen-Xers (say, pre-1965 Gen-X). Anyone under 40, or especially under 30, would hate this nostalgia piece.

Dick Brody wasn't thrilled and got out his thesaurus: "the banalization of its meditative, nearly collage-like sense of memory." Melissa Anderson nails it in this brief review: "a trip back in time in which era-specific talismans substitute for genuine thought. Though big feels glut 20th Century Women, even emotion seems ersatz."