Some second thoughts about Boyhood: the film's closing credits provide a list of actors in the order of their appearance. The list is enormous, almost as long as the lists of special effects technicians in a Hollywood blockbuster. A remarkable characteristic of the film is its depiction of vivid, highly engaging characters who occupy the screen for a scene or two and, then, vanish from the movie. For instance, there is a twelve-year old girl who talks to Mason as they walk together down an alleyway with the courthouse behind them in the distance. The girl is very precocious and her words are fascinating and express her individuality with an almost Shakespearian vividness. After this scene, designed to set up a party, we don't see her again. She exits the film and doesn't return. A similar effect arises with respect to a sequence introducing the parents of the young wife that the Ethan Hawke character has married. These people are traditional rural Texans, deeply religious but warm, loving, and apparently, tolerant. (Linklater seems to insert this sequence in part as reparations for an earlier and unfair caricature of a right-wing opponent to Obama's election -- although the director is an equal opportunity offender: he also includes a very funny and equally unfair caricature of an Obama supporter). These people, who take Mason to church and teach him to shoot firearms, are appealing and we would like to see more of them. But when the sequence ends, they are no longer in the movie. The most alarming, but also truthful example of Linklater's willingness to discard characters arises in the section of the film devoted to the alcoholic college professor stepfather. Mason and his sister are raised for several years with a stepbrother and stepsister -- these children are on-screen for ten or fifteen minutes and much lip-service is given to the notion that they comprise, with Mason and his sister, a "family." In fact, Mason's mother says that one of the benefits of living with the vicious drunk is that they now have "a family." But when the college professor becomes intolerably abusive, Mason's mother leaves him, drags her children out of the home, and abandons the other two children to the drunken rage of their father. Mason and his sister anxiously ask their mother: "Will we ever see them again?" She replies honestly: "Probably not." So much for the notion that step-brothers and step-sisters comprise a "family." In the end, blood-relations are what counts and Mason's step-siblings are simply abandoned -- as predicted by his mother, we never see them again. What is moving and disturbing about Linklater's pattern of abandoning characters who seem to be important to the movie is the one exception to this principle -- the Hispanic workman who re-appears as a success proclaiming that a kind word from Mason's mother has "changed (his) life." This man, who plays no role at all in Mason's life, return for a short sequence in the film. But Mason's step-brother and step-sister are lost forever. This is an irony derived from real life: people who don't matter to us keep turning up -- those that we love often vanish from our lives and are never seen again.
In general, Boyhood shows us only what Mason can see and know. There are two counter-examples that I recall: one of them arises in the conventional narrative involving the drunk professor, a portion of the film that, as I have argued, doesn't really fit the pattern of the rest of the film -- it's too melodramatic and narrative in character, briefly similar to Bergman's Fanny and Alexander or Dickens. In that part of the movie, we see the drunk pouring a huge glass of vodka from a jug that he has hidden in the laundry-room. This shot is intended to demonstrate that the professor is an alcoholic, something that has been telegraphed to us in an earlier scene when the professor and mother, having returned from a honeymoon in Paris, are eating with the kids at a restaurant -- the professor declines to order dessert but calls for another bottle of wine. The shot with the hidden bottle is unnecessary and over explicit and should be cut from the film. The only other example of a scene in which something happens that Mason could not have observed is when his mother remonstrates with Mason's sister about not picking him up -- Mason's sister with an impertinent friend are reclining on her bed as the mother bitches at her. The fact that this scene violates the film's point of view rule is not noticeable while you are watching the movie -- indeed, Mason's sister is a more important character than Mason himself during the first half of the film.
I wonder if there were not many more scenes shot than are included in the cut of the movie that I saw. A puzzling aspect of the film is the appearance from time to time of characters that everyone onscreen knows but that we haven't met. An example is the appearance of a man who seems to be the brother of Mason's father. This uncle is a bearded rascal and he talks about how Mason was the result of an unwanted pregnancy at Mason's graduation party. We haven't seen this fellow before. I wonder if he figures in scenes that were cut from the movie.
In contrast to a well-made and wonderfully entertaining Hollywood film like Guardians of the Galaxy, Boyhood stays with you and expands in your memory. You recall things from Boyhood as if they were mysterious events in your own life. Things bother you and you mull them over in your mind. The shot of Mason's stepbrother and stepsister gazing down over a banister as the drunk professor begrudgingly accedes to the removal of Mason and his sister from his household is a disturbing image, albeit one that is not dramatized or pictorially impressive. The plight of those children and the film's willingness to discard them as irrelevant to its larger concerns is something that you don't notice while watching the film, but it's a troubling effect that stays with you days later.
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