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Home » Culture and Criticism

5/31: Boyhood

Submitted by on January 5, 2015 – 3:43 PM3 Comments
Screen: IFC Productions / Detour

Screen: IFC Productions / Detour

I watched Boyhood a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been trying to find a way into my write-up ever since.

The problem is that the few notes I took concern themselves almost entirely with negatives, things that didn’t work for me or clanky bits, when overall I loved Boyhood the way you love a person, in spite of the flaws and also because of them, the crooked humming and off-key broken noses that make a beloved yours and real. It’s so watchable, so compelling, even when it departs somewhat from the eponymous boy (Ellar Coltrane) and wanders over to his mom (Patricia Arquette) or her drain-circling marriage to Bill (Marco Perella); it’s the closest thing to a true hybrid of fiction and documentary that I’ve seen, because the way Richard Linklater built it, in bursts and bits over a dozen years, lets you see life and lives lived in the actors’ faces as time passes.

But as often happens in Linklater joints, there’s the occasional spasm of C-plussy acting or middle-of-the-fairway telling instead of showing, and putting up the occasional traditional first-act/second-act etc. tentpole isn’t Linklater’s strength. I watched his late-’90s bank-robbery pic The Newton Boys over the weekend, and in Roger Ebert’s review, he observes, “The film chronicles their career in a low-key, meandering way; we’re hanging out with them more than we’re being told a story.” This isn’t a complaint on Ebert’s part as far as I can tell, and I’d certainly consider it an endorsement on mine, because Linklater’s great gift is immersing us in a time or a feeling or a group of people: Mason and Samantha and their shifting family; the last day of school in the mid-seventies; a train robbery from a time when getting shot in the face (twice!) wouldn’t necessarily kill you. To Linklater, the inciting incident is…you, showing up with a box of Sourpatch Kids to watch the day(s) in the life he’s put together.

By that same token, when Linklater seems to lose confidence in that…informal formalism? the cinema of texture? Whatever we want to call it, he from time to time looks down, sees the valley floor far below, and throws in a shot of Mason looking at his mother’s love interest of the time and frowning verrrry pointedly; or inserts an awkward and not very credible dinner at which Bill’s drunken raging finally breaks the camel’s back (prior to that, the portrayal of Bill’s bloaty slide into a bottle of Popov had a perfectly light touch). Even the last scene felt oddly stiff, not just because Mason is tripping with a bunch of other frosh he’s never met before. It feels like Linklater is trying a little too hard to go out on a profundity, and when Arquette has just had that pleading speech about where the time goes, and thinking there’d be more than this, maybe easing up on the deeper-meanings throttle is the way to go in the final sequence.

Understand, though: this is a great film. It’s a triumph of unfilmic film things like planning, somehow not over-planning, and having a good ear for people (nobody better understands what Ethan Hawke can do than Linklater). It’s a bold experiment in time-lapse storytelling. Most of all, it’s what Linklater does and has always done so well: telling a story by hanging out.

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3 Comments »

  • Omar G. says:

    I love your take on this because I definitely had clanky moments seeing it in the theater. But by the end of it, it just had this bulldozing cumulative effect that outweighed any misgivings I had about it. Yeah, that Arquette bit at the end just kills.

  • Erin W says:

    I felt so much for Mason’s mom in her final scene. I don’t know anything about being an Empty Nester, but as soon as the scene opened, and we saw her new tiny apartment and she was set up doing paperwork on like, a corner of an end table, I thought, Oooh, she downsized a little too much. You’re a professor! Get yourself a nice condo with a legit office!

    In all the college scenes (when he visits with the girlfriend, when they hang out with the sister in the bar, with the new roommate etc.) I felt the characters really striving to show how profound and adult they were, and I think that was the point. They’re all legal adults now, but they have so much still to learn. I mean, we saw his parents learning hard lessons throughout their thirties, so I guess the movie’s not trying to make that a big secret.

    The theme I liked best in the movie was the way, especially as he became a teenager, every single person in the world seemed to want to give Mason a speech that would turn his life around; they were just clamoring to mentor him. I asked my boyfriend if that’s what it’s like growing up as a middle-class white boy. He said, “kinda.”

  • Finally got to see this, and I really liked it. I agree Linklater is better at the small moments than the big ones, but I think the latter moments were fine, and I think the end worked perfectly because it was open-ended. It showed now that he’s passed boyhood, as it were, there’s an unknown future out there for him.

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