Boyhood

We meet Mason (Coltrane) when he's an oft-distracted six (I think) year old living with his single mom Olivia (Arquette) and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater). They are moving back to Houston, where mom is from, so she can go back to school and make a better life for them. Also moving back to Houston is her ex-husband and father of her children, Mason Sr. (Hawke). He has been in Alaska for quite some time. Once in Houston, they get to see him every other weekend. Life ensues. Quite literally.

What makes Boyhood different from every other movie is the sheer dedication it took to get it filmed. Director Richard Linklater put his cast together way back when and work with them periodically over a twelve year stretch to complete his film. The aging we see on the screen is all organic. This bolsters the illusion that we are really watching a family at various points in their collective lives. Watching the physical progression of the kids is especially fascinating. We notice many of the subtle differences in their appearances from one year to the next, as well as the occasional drastic change. This is a little less fun in regards to the adults, but does give us a couple takeaways. Patricia Arquette is aging gracefully while Ethan Hawke hardly looks a day older.

In sports, a person gifted at one particular aspect of their game is likely to cause them to be highly valued, overvalued, even if they are deficient in all other areas. A baseball player, for instance, might be thought to be great if he hits a lot of home runs, regardless of how bad he is at everything else. Here, the dozen years it took to make this movie are akin to gaudy home run totals. It's enough to make some believe it's a great movie. Boyhood was even nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, appearing to be the front-runner during the weeks leading up to the ceremony (we'll get to the actual victor, Birdman, within a week's time). Aside from watching time transform the people we're watching, there is nothing here to warrant such acclaim. Linklater sought to mimic a boy growing up within the space of a movie. It's a lofty goal, one in which he succeeded, in a literal sense. For his effort, and that of the cast, this film was showered with praise.


What has gone ignored is the complete lack of a narrative or any sort of commentary. Boyhood lays flatly on the screen, not doing much of anything except marking the passage of time. Each scene gives us a quick glimpse at what Mason and/or Sam are up to, an argument between any two (or three) of the four main characters, at least a couple shots of whatever technology is hot at the time, and tries to build Mason into this deep, philosophical thinker harping on the meaning of life. As he gets older, there is some rebellion thrown in. By the time he hits his teenage years, every sentence out of his mouth basically says "I'm a hopeless emo, and here's why you should be, too." We also get an update on mom's love life, occasionally on dad's, too. Things don't always happen in the same order, but it's always the same stuff. When we notice everyone looking slightly older, we know we've restarted the cycle. We're shown all of this, but nothing rises to the level of plot nor conflict, therefore we are without solution or climax. It's formless as any of our lives are bound to be if someone dropped in on us once a year to film us just existing for a short while then went about their business. It isn't very interesting to watch. In fact, it's downright dull. It's s series of oddly disjointed, yet repetitive vignettes featuring the same people. Bouncing in and out of their world creates a detachment that's hard to overcome. We fail to care about any of these folks beyond what they will look like in the next scene. Boyhood fails where reality TV succeeds.

I hate reality TV, but there is a reason it has become hugely popular. Starting with The Real World, over twenty years ago, the producers of these shows have understood that we really don't want to watch people live their mundane day-to-day lives. We give lip service to the idea, but don't really mean it. Imagine going over to your neighbor's for an entire day, just sitting in the corner and watching them without ever interacting. In most cases, this might be fun for a while, but once you get the gist of what each person does on a daily basis, it would cease to hold your attention. What we really want, on average, is to see how "real people" act and react when the tropes of fiction are thrust into their lives. To achieve this, storylines are pushed which will surely lead to conflict. Certain people are portrayed as heroes and villains. In some case, its subjects are fabulously wealthy, living far beyond the means of most of its viewers creating a spectacle of regular things. Linklater either fails or refuses to grasp this concept. He deems it enough to merely point the camera at these folks just being people. It's admirable, but boring.

I'm not at all suggesting he go to the lengths and/or sink to the depths of reality television. I am suggesting that he do more than assume we'd fall madly in love with this family simply because he shows us so much of them in a literal sense. Plenty slice-of-life movies manage to draw us in without utilizing tons of conventional story-telling methods. The recent Drinking Buddies comes to mind. They do so by emotionally tethering us to the people on the screen. These films may lack a true beginning, middle, and end, but there is "something" that the characters are dealing with that makes us care. Boyhood might want to to do this, but has no idea how to go about it. We see this family argue, and see that they are different than they were a short while ago, but we never see them deal with anything. Most of the problem-solving, or not solving, happens off-screen between the times we see them. We hear about it later. The effect is that the movie drones on and on, showing us the same thing over and over with people who are progressively a year older than in the prior scene. To do this, we get way too close to three hours. That's entirely too long for a movie that says nothing. A collection of still photos rapidly cycled through in one of those four minute time-lapse videos you can watch on YouTube would have had the same effect, and taken up much less of your day.