Boyhood

Over the last several months, I’ve given myself the ongoing task of catching up on important and influential films that anyone who considers themselves to be an informed moviegoer should have seen. I started in the early silent era with Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates from 1919 and moved forward in time, watching one film from each decade. Today’s show brings me up to the present day – back to the teens again – with Richard Linklater’s 2014 film-like-no-other, Boyhood.

 Just the project of the film itself makes Boyhood notable. Linklater decided in the early 2000s that he wanted to make a film tracking one kid from first grade through the end of high school, filming once a year for twelve years, and having the film culminate with the protagonist heading off to college. Not a documentary but a narrative fiction film with the same actors, watching them age, mature, and change over time. Miraculously, he finagled ongoing funding for this unheard-of project to the tune of 200,000 dollars a year for twelve years – or 2.4 million – and shooting began in 2002.

When Boyhood came out, much of the talk was about the novelty of it. A secret movie being filmed under industry noses for over a decade? A child growing into a young man on screen before our very eyes? One of the longest production schedules in history? Amazing!

But the real story of the film is not the gimmick. Instead, it is the emotional resonance and verisimilitude of it that is striking. Speaking both as a former boy myself and as a parent of kids struggling to mature and grow before my very eyes, some of the scenes in Boyhood are the realest things I’ve seen on film.

Ellar Coltrane stars as Mason Evans Junior, the boy of the title. He begins the film as a first-grader. His parents, played by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are divorced and struggling to make ends meet and raise kids while they are trying to figure out their own lives. Mason is curious, observant, and sensitive. Like any kid, he fights with his sister, zones out sometimes in class, and hangs out doing idle, vaguely destructive things with his friends.

The film doesn’t have a plot exactly, but it’s not shapeless either. It checks in with Mason about once a year as the various events that make up a life occur. They move to a new town, his dad comes for his every other week visit, his mom remarries, he meets a cute girl at school, his mom divorces, his dad remarries, there are bullies at school. Individually, these events don’t necessarily have much resonance but taken collectively and held together by Ellar Coltrane’s remarkably organic performance, they accumulate over the course of the film’s nearly three hour running time. 

Eventually, this collection of seemingly unimportant events feels epic and powerful. Eventually, all the little things that don’t seem to mean anything at the time come to mean everything. It is kind of like life in that way.

This is the element that makes Boyhood so unique and compelling. Even though it is fiction, even though it is fragmentary and somewhat meandering, watching these characters age and struggle and evolve over the course of twelve years gives it a heft and meaning that transcends the story itself. The movie isn’t just about Mason or even his extended circle. It’s about life and the passage of time; the ongoing back and forth between joy and disappointment; and the flaring, momentary beauties in lives made up of mostly boring, everyday stuff.