Boyhood

The joys of a young child can be ruined by the yelling of adults. This is how "Boyhood" starts. There's a young child (Ellar Coltrane) lying in the grass, unobtrusively staring at the sky. His mother (Patricia Arquette) picks him up and asks him how his day was, gently prodding him about negative progress reports she's receiving from his teacher. His mother mentions that the teacher claims Mason, the young boy, deliberately inserted rocks into the classroom's pencil sharpener. She keeps asking why he would do such a thing. His eventual response is he assumed that because the machines make pencils sharp, it would do the same of rocks. He is quite the curious young boy, as most children often are.

"Boyhood" is an epic story. A film like this--one that takes place over twelve years--would typically feature a young actor as Mason at age six, then another one in his early teen years, then perhaps a twenty-something actor as a college-bound young man. His parents would be played by Arquette and Ethan Hawke, but they would have makeup applied to them throughout the filming to at times make them look younger and other times to make them look older. Not so with "Boyhood."

"Boyhood," directed by Richard Linklater (who, with "Dazed and Confused," "Waking Life," "School of Rock" and the "Before" trilogy, has show that he is one of America's most versatile directors) is a most unusual movie-making experiment, one unlike just about any other American film before it. Unlike the traditional approach, it has literally been filmed over twelve years. Starting in 2002, Mason grows up before our eyes. "It's time for you to grow up!" could be the mantra of his story. His inquisitiveness shifts to cynicism but ultimately bends towards optimism. He's a "yeah, I guess" kind of kid who doesn't appear to excel as much as his sister (Lorelei Linklater); his eyebrows seem permanently arched, particularly in his preteen years. By the time he's an adult, he looks a bit like Peter Dinklage. But in every one of these twelve years, it seems to be that he is the brunt of every sort of lecture. Have you ever seen a more relaxed youth on the screen? I can't recall any scenes of tantrums or even fighting back. The film (and trailer) make excellent use of an exceptional song called "Hero" by Family of the Year. The lyrics "let me go; I don't want to be your hero" seem to exemplify Mason's persona.  

But ultimately, this movie is good, but not great. Hawke (Linklater's collaborator on the "Before" trilogy) overdoes it in a scene or two. The film goes on for about 40 minutes too long, and Linklater's dialogue is painful at many times in the film--virtually every line from a young person sounds incredibly artificial.

But what I do like most about "Boyhood" is the complexities, because such is life. You can find such complexities in the role of Mason's parents. Sarah Boxer in the Atlantic recently asked why all the mothers in Disney films die, arguing that the beneficiary of a dead mother in children's films is a good father. In "Boyhood," it's not so simple. Early on, the father certainly does, in the eyes of the two children, come across as "the nice one," giving away gifts liberally and taking his children out for bowling and French fries while their mother scolds them for not doing their homework. Hawke's character, we are told, has just returned from Alaska, where he worked. At various times in the story, he is unemployed. The mother, on the other hand, moves the kids around for better economic opportunities. Mason and his sister get to see their dad on the weekends, but their father is replaced by one alcoholic after the other. One of them is possibly suffering through post-traumatic stress disorder and the other has a frightening malicious disposition in his eyes. The latter is played by Marco Perella, and he's absolutely terrifying, even in his "normal" scenes. There haven't been scenes of childhood abuse this disturbing since "This Boy's Life" more than twenty years ago. Fortunately, Mason still has his two loving parents. This ultimately might be a story not necessarily of a young boy but of his relationship to his two loving parents; the parents might not love each other anymore, but they certainly love their children.