Runtime: 2 hours, 46 minutes
Rating: R
Director: Richard Linklater
Quick Impressions:
Boyhood is generating a lot of buzz, and of course, the biggest talking point is that Richard Linklater filmed it using the same cast over a period of almost twelve years. Such a huge risk seems destined to end in either spectacular failure or tremendous success. So far, given its generally positive reviews and word of mouth, this film is certainly a critical success. Boyhood will most likely end in some Oscar recognition for Linklater and will almost definitely end in a frantic sprint to the bathroom for most of the audience.
That’s the other thing about Boyhood. It’s almost three hours long. When the movie begins, Mason Evans, Jr. (to whose boyhood the title refers) appears to be finishing up first grade. By the time the movie ends, Mason has just arrived at college, excited to start his freshman year. Similarly, when I arrived at the theater, I had just dropped my daughter off at kindergarten, and when the movie was over, I had to rush home to pick her up at the end of the school day.
Now movies about boys growing up are not exactly hard to come by. (And if what I’ve seen in the movies is true, more boys grow up in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana than anywhere else in the entire world.) But what makes Boyhood stand apart from other bildungsromanesque cinematic fare is that young actor Ellar Coltrane really is first seven, then eight, then nine, then ten, and so on up until Mason graduates from high school and heads off to college at eighteen. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a (non-documentary) feature film attempt anything similar. (I wish they’d make movies like this more often, to be honest. I’ve often wished that stars with long careers/lives would have secretly collaborated on a project of this nature. I mean, just imagine if Mickey Rooney filmed a scene of a movie every year of his working life! My kindergartener would have graduated from high school by the time I finished watching that movie!)
It’s really weird to watch actors age naturally over such a long period of time. At one point I caught myself thinking, They’ve aged Patricia Arquette too much. Ethan Hawke looks almost exactly the same, and…Oh wait! This is real. (I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the way Patricia Arquette has aged. If anything, I’m starting to think that Ethan Hawke is secretly a mannequin.)
Early on, Boyhood reminded me a bit of The Tree of Life. The movies have some obvious points of similarity, although quite soon their pronounced differences become equally obvious. The Tree of Life is like a visual poem showing us one child’s attempt to make sense of the life he’s experiencing. Boyhood is more straight-forward, no-nonsense narrative, of the slice-of-life variety. Ellar Coltrane is certainly a photogenic child, though, with extremely emotive eyes. Like the kids in The Tree of Life, he’s an immensely compelling screen presence. What’s weird of course, is thinking, That child actor really shows promise, and then realizing as the movie goes on that in the present day, he’s already an adult.
I think I saw Boyhood at the perfect time. It’s a refreshing complement to Snowpiercer, the film I watched yesterday. Both projects are good, but Snowpiercer is pointed allegory, overflowing with “meaning,” which it really lays on thick. In contrast, Boyhood just likes to show us a bunch of stuff happening as if we’re watching a family’s real life. Watching the two of them in quick succession is like enjoying a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The peanut butter and jelly taste better together because their individual flavors are so different from one another.
(You can tell I have a very sophisticated palette, right? Even if they’re not haute cuisine, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are so tasty, though, so I don’t know why my daughter keeps not eating the ones I pack in her lunch. Maybe tomorrow I’ll start making a movie about that little mystery. I’ll call it Girlhood. It will be coming to a theater near you in 12-13 years.)
The Good:
This is a great movie. It’s immediately engaging, and surprisingly fun to watch. Right away we get musical and visual clues to help us orient ourselves in time. (“Yellow” by Coldplay plays during the opening scene, and a bit later we see Mason watching Pokemon on what now looks like a completely archaic TV.) It’s funny to think that these now archaisms are not included only to remind us that it’s the past since the movie was actually filmed when that time period was the present. I’m wondering if Linklater took more footage than he needed, then (years) later decided to highlight certain objects/ideas/events that would seem particularly dated or ironic at the time of editing. But it may just be that the world has changed an awful lot since 2002.
The “story” is told slice-of-life style, in a series of compelling vignettes. The first time we time jump forward to the next segment, it feels briefly disorienting, but soon we get used to this structure. For audience members who find Mason compelling immediately, the film is highly watchable and enjoyable right from the start, even though nothing in particular is happening. This is not the kind of movie that shows exciting events occurring in a conveniently contrived way. Instead it just gives us small bursts of real life doing what it does best.
One thing I really like about the film is the fluidity of the characters. As in real life, people change, grow, progress, regress. On the other hand, we also begin (and rather early) to see that patterns in people’s behavior do emerge over time with some distance. Initially, Mason’s mom seems like the obvious choice for “better” parent. (I use the quotes because parenthood is not a contest, but it seems like the movie plans to treat it as one as the story begins.) At the beginning, Mason’s mom is relentlessly devoted to her kids and way more stable and emotionally mature than the father. But as the movie goes on, our impressions of these characters change, and, in fact, the characters themselves change a bit. I appreciated this relative subtlety. (Often movies set up clichéd, one-dimensional characters and then never let the characters deviate from those roles. Real life seldom works exactly like that.)
Another thing I particularly like is the way the film shows us age appropriate (to Mason) versions of reality. Early on, the kids are really into the Harry Potter books. (It’s funny because I almost thought, No that was in that movie I watched before Boyhood, but then I remembered that the movie I was watching two and a half hours before the end of Boyhood was Boyhood.) The presence of Harry Potter is highly appropriate not only as a culturally relevant time marker, but also because J.K. Rowling excels at giving Harry a realistic outlook on life that changes with his age and always seems eerily realistic and age-appropriate. The same thing happens in this movie. Near the end, we get to hear so many of Mason’s philosophical views on life. Instead of focusing on the rest of the family, we’re with Mason almost all the time, hearing all the brooding ideas he seems to believe are relatively original to him. It gets a bit frustrating, but artistically it works because the reason the movie becomes so obsessed with him is that he’s become a self-obsessed adolescent. The whole movie is like that. We feel that we’re seeing what Mason sees, lingering over the details that seem to matter particularly to him.
The characters are reasonably well written and seem pretty realistic. (You know they’re realistic because sometimes you want to throttle some of them.) Yes, yes, Mason’s sister is unpleasantly self-centered and his stepfathers are almost ridiculously huge jerks, but that’s because we’re getting this story from Mason’s point of view. Late in the movie, he remarks that his mother means well, but she’s just as confused about life as he is. This spoken assessment jives with what we’ve seen of her. Over and over again, Mason’s mom comes across as someone who means well but makes bad choices because she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Clearly the movie punches those moments because the emphasis we see is Mason’s. By the end of the movie, we may not know exactly who his mother is, but we know exactly who Mason thinks she is. While watching, we are shown all the elements contributing to his growing understanding of the world as he experienced them. This is a very interesting way of telling a story. When I walked into the theater, I thought, This will be like watching an entire TV series collapsed, but it’s actually more like reading a book written in first person. There are tons of books done in this fashion, but far fewer movies (and no other stand-alone movies I can think of where the lead actor ages this dramatically during production).
Often Boyhood reminded me of my own childhood. It made me remember how many times we moved (I went to thirteen schools in thirteen years), how powerless I was in all of that, how often my life completely changed. Mason doesn’t move quite as many times as I did, but he actually switches immediate family members multiple times, a challenge I never had to endure. Mason’s ideas in adolescence struck a chord with me, too. I remember so well feeling controlled and bossed around and manipulated by everyone who had “power” over me (i.e. parents, teachers), and Mason’s insight that “they don’t even realize it,” really resonated with me. But what really impressed me was the realization that adolescence is just another stage of development we all go through, the final stage of child development. That’s so easy to see as an adult, but when you’re experiencing it, you feel like you’re making brand new discoveries, that you’re completely an adult now, that you understand things that other people (especially older people) cannot.
The principal actors also give fantastic performances. Ethan Hawke is absolutely great. Patricia Arquette brings wonderful depth to an underwritten (though, admittedly, perhaps underwritten by design) character. If the movie goes on to get Oscar recognition, a nomination for one of them does not seem impossible. But we’ll see. It’s incredibly early in the year.
Ellar Coltrane is great at every age (and seemed especially like the ideal exemplar of an adolescent). What’s odd is that by the end of the movie, he actually starts to resemble Ethan Hawke. I don’t know if that’s good acting or good luck, but it surprised me because he didn’t look at all like Hawke when the movie started.
Lorelei Linklater (the director’s daughter) also gives a great performance. She makes the character of Samantha extremely realistic and consistent (and so frustrating and annoying, so aggravating).
I was also really impressed with Zoe Graham as Sheena. Her performance seems so genuine, so authentic, and she has a special kind of star-level luminance that makes me sure we’ll see her in more movies very soon.
Best Action Sequence:
Second husband #1’s epic, alcohol-fueled meltdown is absolutely riveting and terrifying to watch. Mason’s mother’s response to this makes her more sympathetic to the audience, and I was fascinated by how differently her son and daughter react to her behavior.
Best Scene:
I’m a big fan of Mason’s birthday party with his father’s new family. So much has changed for his father, so it has to change for Mason and Sam, too. The thing is, life is really like that, especially for kids. But what’s nice is that even though Mason and his sister clearly seem slightly uncomfortable with this new way of life, they’re still kind and polite and clearly have a good relationship with their father, treating him with the same respect he has always taken pains to show to them. (I’m not saying he didn’t fail a lot, but he certainly always tried.) Clearly the kids have a lot to adjust to. Things could go south any minute, and yet, by the end of this sequence, Mason and his sister are happily singing a song with their new family.
Best Scene Visually:
Since I’m from Texas, I loved seeing all the locations. The scenes of hiking at Big Bend and other spots are by far the most pleasing aesthetically, although it was nice to see the exciting and familiar streets of Austin, too.
The Negatives:
It’s too bad the movie stops when Mason is eighteen. I think Linklater should keep filming it and present the public with a sequel called Manhood in about twenty years. Maybe he could just keep filming it indefinitely and offer up the final version just before his death.
The problem with the movie finishing when Mason’s eighteen is that Mason hasn’t finished yet. He’s actually in a stage of growth that can be annoying to non-sympathetic onlookers. He reminds me of a lot of college freshmen I knew over the years (when I was a college freshman and when I was teaching college freshmen). For whatever reason, young men seem particularly given to gloomy philosophizing. This bent often makes the person come across as pretentious, but actually, in my experience, people at this age are surprisingly earnest and genuine (which is a big redeeming factor to consider when becoming annoyed with a self-obsessed, philosophical, idealistic new adult). I think ending the film here opens Linklater to a lot of criticism because the tone of the movie has definitely changed, and to some people the last part might seem lazy rather than deliberate. If we got to see Mason emerge from adolescence and the film adapt to his new life stage accordingly, Linklater’s careful artistry might be harder to miss or discount. I know every story has to end somewhere, but it’s really hard to make a movie about a person feel complete when it ends just as his adult life is about to begin.
This leads me to a related problem. I get the idea that we’re getting Mason’s view of his mother. It’s very limited and limiting. Clearly Mason has the insight to notice (before she does) that she always dates/marries alcoholics who eventually treat him badly, but he never seems to think to ask why. I’d love to know more about his mother. We get Mason’s dad’s explanation (which seems fair given the context and speaker, but is about the farthest thing from unbiased).
I suppose at the end, Mason has come to the related realizations that life happens to people and that he really doesn’t know anything. That’s definitely the end of Boyhood and the beginning of adulthood, but it’s frustrating for a movie audience to see characters for three hours of our lives and twelve years of theirs and then get only a child’s insights into what makes them tick. By the time Mason is starting to grow up, the movie is over. We’ve seen enough of his take on his parents to get a good idea of what his childhood was like for him, but we still don’t really know what any of the other characters are actually like as people.
Of course, that’s part of the point of the movie, I think, that the human experience is vast and unfathomable. It seems to take us practically our entire lives just to develop something close to true insight about ourselves, and then we die. We’re all in the same world together, and yet we never really know anyone else the way we come to know ourselves.
It all makes sense. It all checks out. It’s just a little frustrating.
One caveat, too: If you don’t like this movie within the first five minutes, you’re very likely to hate the rest of it. This is not the kind of movie in which something happens. The only thing that happens is mundane life. If you fail to connect to Mason (if watching him hang out with his family just bores you), you will probably hate this movie. And it’s three hours long, so…don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Overall:
Richard Linklater’s recent movies (like Bernie and Before Midnight) have been generating so much positive feedback from critics and movie lovers that it’s easy to imagine some Oscar recognition for this year’s Boyhood. I found the movie consistently engrossing for the entirety of its nearly three hour runtime. The novelty of watching a young actor grow up is getting this film a lot of attention, and rightly so. What other movie out there right now offers something like that?