On C’mon C’mon

Mar 22, 2022

Last year, I shared something with one of my sisters that I thought she would’ve wanted to know. I was so confident I was doing the right thing, but I completely misjudged the situation and unleashed a world of hurt and anger that I didn’t see coming. We didn’t talk for many months after that conversation—I didn’t call because I didn’t know what to say, and the more time passed, the less I knew what to say, and at some point, it became more about “But why isn’t she calling me?” and less about the mistake I made to start it all.

Eventually, I reached out, and we set up a time to talk, scheduling a conversation like it was a work meeting, which is appropriate, I guess, because it was draining, like work. I cried through most of the call; she seemed unrecognizably cold and distant (that’s my role, I felt like saying, how dare she assume my role?), which only made me cry more. At one point, I said, “I would rather never talk to you again than upset you that much.” She seemed shocked by this and said that getting upset with each other is normal in relationships, and I saw the message drifting away from me, like a raft in the lake, and I was never able to get it back.

She thought I didn’t wanted to upset her that much, ever again, because I couldn’t handle being yelled at by her. But that wasn’t it at all. I can take being yelled at. The reason I didn’t want to upset her that much, ever again, is because she was the one person in my life that I thought I’d done things right with, the one relationship I hadn’t fucked up.

I thought of this as I watched the brilliant film C’mon C’mon, written and directed by Mike Mills. Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), a This American Life–style radio interviewer, is conducting interviews with kids around the country about their lives and their thoughts on the future. In the middle of this project, on the one-year anniversary of his mother’s death, he calls his sister, Viv (Gaby Hoffmann), who lives in Los Angeles with her nine-year-old son, Jesse (Woody Norman). Viv’s husband, Paul (Scoot McNairy), from whom she’s separated, has just moved to Oakland to take a job, and he’s having trouble adjusting—he’s bipolar, and the move has been difficult, and he needs her help. Viv needs someone to watch Jesse, and Johnny volunteers. What’s supposed to be a few days, turns into a few weeks and takes Johnny and Jesse to New York and then New Orleans before Viv can finally collect Jesse and take him home.

The film has several layers. On the shimmering surface, it’s about the relationship between Johnny and his nephew. They don’t really know each other when the film starts—Jesse’s only nine, and he hasn’t seen his uncle for a year, so he barely remembers him—and watching them navigate this terrain together, watching Johnny figure out how to take care of a kid, is sweet without being sappy, funny without going for the easy laugh. I felt a little like I was holding my breath for him, for them, hoping it would all be okay.

Another layer, a thread woven through the film from the beginning to the very end, is the unscripted interviews with real kids, conducted by the actors for the film. Johnny puts it this way: “Okay, I’m gonna ask you a series of questions, and there are no right or wrong answers. So, when you think about the future, how do you imagine it’ll be? Like, what will nature be like? How will your city change? Will families be the same? What will stay with you, and what will you forget? What scares you? What makes you angry? Do you feel lonely? What makes you happy?” Big questions with equally big answers.

The final layer, the one underpinning everything, is the story of Johnny and Viv. It’s told through brief flashbacks to their mother’s death, and phone conversations between the two siblings about how hard it is, taking care of Jesse, and their relationship, and how things went wrong. Jesse keeps asking Johnny why he’s not married, and why he and Viv don’t talk. When Johnny tells Viv about this, she says, “Well, you could tell him the truth.”

“That sounds fun,” Johnny says. “Just tell your nine-year-old the truth. What . . . which part? That I messed up with you and Paul, that I got in the middle of something I didn’t understand? That part?”

“Oh, yeah, that’s good,” Viv says. “That’s a really good start.”

“Or was it when Mom died, we got into all that weird shit when Mom died. That part?”

“You mean, like all that weird shit of our entire lives? That stuff?”

“Yeah, our entire lives,” Johnny says.

Shot in black-and-white, C’mon C’mon is an ode to familial love, particularly of the sibling kind, in which nothing is black and white. It’s about the “you always”–ness of families, the ways we focus on patterns of the past and can’t see the present. It’s about not being present. As one of the kids says, when asked what adults could have done differently: “Definitely, most of all, paid more attention to, like, what’s going on around them. . . .” We’re all so spent—focused on work and responsibilities, making dinner and doing the dishes and taking out the trash—that we’re not paying attention, we’re not listening.

And listening is what the film is about, too, literally, because of the nature of Johnny’s job. He lets Jesse use his headphones and teaches him how to record sound, and they wander—first, the beaches of Los Angeles, and then the streets of New York—just listening. “It all sounds amazing in here,” Jesse says.

Early on, when Johnny first arrives at Viv and Jesse’s house, they’re having dinner, and Jesse is talking about trees communicating via a network of fungus underground. I kept coming back to that, this idea of trees communicating with each other, even when they don’t appear to be, of trees being connected, way down at their roots, at their deepest parts, their foundation. And I thought of my sisters, and how, even if we aren’t talking, we’re still connected, because everything I am they’re a part of, because they’re part of me.

Makes Sense

On C’mon C’mon