If you’re looking for something, anything, to lift your spirits out of the sewer that is our current moment and forget for 108 precious minutes that there is a raging plague all around us, look no further than the best film of 2021, Mike Mills’s newest effort, C’mon C’mon.
But don’t misunderstand me in thinking the movie is all rainbows and puppy dogs. Here you will experience sadness – in the form of a pulsing melancholy that Mills has mastered – frustration, and even, in moments, hopelessness. The messiness of human existence ensures that the bad must come with the good. That good, though, the transcendent wonder that sometimes briefly reveals itself as part of being a human on planet Earth, is achingly beautiful. Mills captures it in a most sublime way in C’mon C’mon.