Boyhood

Richard Linklater's Boyhood is a philosophical and esthetic experiment masquerading as a 2 1/2 hour feature film.  The experiment poses two closely related questions:  what are the limits of realism? and is it possible to make a work that is, as the arch-realist Flaubert dreamed, "about nothing?"  Flaubert understood that realism is the opposite e of plot or narrative devised around thematic or symbolic parameters. Indeed, realism may be the opposite of storytelling in general -- real life is not a story and doesn't proceed according to tidy symbolic or thematic structures.  Boyhood explores these notions.  It is film about "nothing."

The situation presented by the movie (I can't call it a plot) is events in the life of a boy, Mason Evans, Jr.  When the film begins Mason is about six years old.  At the end of the movie, Mason and his family members have aged about twelve years -- he is 18 and commencing college when the film ends.  Mason's mother, played by Patricia Arquette, is generous, kind, and, perhaps, even overly empathetic.  She is separated from Mason's father and the film never establishes whether the couple were married.  (We have to infer what is not shown in the movie without much in the way of clues; Linklater can't supply us with "backstory" because, at least in this movie, he doesn't believe in "story" at all.)  Mason has an older sister who is a perfectionist and always better at everything that she attempts than Mason.  She is loyal to her brother but essentially indifferent to him most of the time.  Mason's father, played by Ethan Hawke, is an aspiring, if unsuccessful, would-be musician and something of a drifter; when the film begins, he has been in Alaska for a year and a half.  Ethan Hawke's character is a typical Linklater dreamer, an idealist with idiosyncratic notions about politics and the world, someone who has never really grown-up, although in the course of the movie he acquires a family of his own, a baby son, and, ultimately, matures to the point that he seems the equal in wisdom and rectitude to Mason's mother.  Patricia Arquette, who has an impressively voluptuous figure (I really liked her in the TV show Medium), has no trouble attracting men, but she has poor judgment in that realm:  she marries one of her college professors who turns out to be a sadistic and embittered drunk and, then, later falls for (and marries) an Iraq war veteran who also turns out to be an angry alcoholic.  (The scenes with raging and drunk college professor have a Dickensian fury and drama that seem to belong in an entirely different movie; Linklater has not yet found his métier in the first part of the movie and, for a time, seems feinting in the direction of conventional narrative, although as the film progresses, the experiment becomes more overt and abstractly austere -- anything like a conventional plot is eschewed.  The movie chronicles Mason's life through a series of tiny episodes that do not cohere into any kind of story or structured representation.  Indeed, the genre to which the film belongs is one that is almost never attempted in motion pictures -- it is the chronicle, that is a series of unrelated incidents befalling an individual described in chronological sequence.  Mason has a girlfriend but loses, and mourns, her.  He is bullied in school.  Generally, he seems to be a poor student, not through lack of intelligence or capability but on the basis of indifference to his academic studies.  He attends a number of parties, meets people, and becomes interested in photography.  At the end of the film, he leaves his mother behind and she proclaims what people in the film's audience have been, perhaps, thinking:  "What was this all for?  It seems to be for nothing."  In that instant in the film, Mason's mother, like all mothers, I think, realizes that with the departure of her youngest child her life, which has revolved around her children, is now irrevocably changed and that she must invent a new identity for herself.  Mason goes to college in West Texas, at some school that seems implausibly close to Big Bend National Park.  (I've been to Big Bend and it is almost impossibly remote -- it takes seven hours to get there from El Paso).  After walking through a canyon with his new roommate and a beautiful young woman who, we sense, will soon be his girlfriend, Mason sits on a rocky ledge overlooking a vast and empty landscape of desert and strange, pale lagoons.  The kids have taken peyote and as the drugs metabolize in their system, Mason pronounces the film's theme and guiding principle:  "People say seize the moment, but what if the moment seizes us... what if the moment is all there is?"  In other words, what if there is no story, no plot, no development of ideas or themes, merely a concatenation of moments, an eternal present tense?  (This notion stands in sharp contrast with another theme in Linklater's films -- the paranoid sense that everything is conspiratorially connected.  In Linklater's films either there is no structure or too much structure -- in Boyhood, we see a mad professor spinning out conspiracy theories at 3 am in a café, kin to the wild-eyed fanatics in Slacker and A Scanner Darkly).

The film's peculiar non-narrative form is a consequence of how the picture was made.  The same actors were used in scenes shot over a period of twelve years.  We see the protagonists age in real life and Mason grows up, progressing from a cute if uncommunicative little boy into a rather dour, and sullen, teenager with a metaphysical bent.  Clearly, a picture made in this way can not be scripted in any conventional sense and the film seems to be mostly improvised.  Linklater avoids most methods that film makers have used to show the past and the way that people's characters develop over time.  The movie makes no attempt to "mark" periods with musical sound cues or, for that matter, television news references -- indeed, the movie seems mostly "timeless," events occurring in an apolitical and ahistorical vacuum.  (The few references to historical events are jarring and seem extraneous to the film's methodology.)   The film is certainly not autobiographical -- Linklater is not showing us events from his own life although the movie is set in Texas, mostly around Houston and San Marcos.  Many great films about childhood present events through the prism of memory -- John Boorman's wonderful Hope and Glory about a boyhood spent during the Blitz, dramatizes the past the way an adult might fondly recall it, and Terence Davies' masterpiece, The Long Day Closes also takes this Proustian form of dream-like recollection.  Other films about the past are nostalgic, for instance, Barry Levinson's Diner.  But Boyhood is completely unlike these movies:  although it is concerned with the passage of time, it is not about the past; rather, it attempts to show us a continuously evolving present.  Linklater grasps that films are inevitably exercises in the present tense and this movie demonstrates this concept, the notion of an eternal present without meaningful past and without any future at all, in a way that is unlike any other movie that I have seen.  From time to time, adult characters lecture Mason about responsibility in ways that are unsympathetic and vaguely belligerent.  These sequences, which are the closest thing that the film has to a thematic structure, feel like a producer lecturing Linklater on the film that we are watching:  You must grow up and fulfill your obligations to the audience by giving them something like a story.  But, like his defiant young hero, Linklater is not willing to conform to custom.  Indeed, if anything the film is so resolutely non-narrative as to seem, at times, unrealistic.  Real life has more narrative closure than the film allows.  In one scene, Mason is lectured about taking photographs and ordered by his teacher to take 300 pictures of a high school football game.  Mason goes to the game and takes a few arty shots and, then, is ordered again to turn his lens on the game.  (Again the sequence could be a trope for Linklater's rejection of typical movie narrative:  he refuses to film the game.)  We expect that this sequence will, at least, lead to the display of some of Mason's pictures or some kind of life-lesson about football or art or something.  But nothing of that sort happens.  The movie just moves on to another event.  When Mason is about 12, he has his hair cut.  Embarrassed by the crew cut that his cruel stepfather imposes upon him, Mason feels ashamed and humiliated when he attends school the next day.  But a little girl sends him a message that says:  "Mason, I think your haircut looks kewl!"  The scene is charming and we expect it to lead somewhere but it doesn't.  Late in the film, Mason watches his father's old roommate performing with a rock and roll band.  The roommate is perpetual youth, someone who will never grow up.  He observes Mason in the balcony watching the rehearsal, salutes him, and, then, dedicates a song to the boy, saying that seeing Mason makes him "feel old."  The song begins but Linklater, who loves rock and roll music, cuts away -- he is unwilling to give us a musical interlude and we feel our expectations again disappointed and, truth to tell, we are more than a little irritated at the director's austerity.  When a narrative loop is closed, this seems accidental and represents an oddity in the universe represented by the film -- for instance, Mason's mother suggests that a Hispanic worker get an education because he is "smart" and, later, we see him managing a restaurant.  He tells Mason's mother that he is studying for a Master's Degree and is assistant manager at their establishment when Mason and his sister are having lunch with their mother.  This sequence violates the rule established by the rest of the film -- that is, the strict disavowal of narrative and continuity of story:  but in the context of the film, this deviation from the movie's non-narrative and open-ended chronicle form merely serves as another reminder that all fictional forms, including the bare chronicle, must suffer deviations from their rules if they are to be considered realistic.  The fact that the 2 and a half hour movie contains one story, albeit a tale that is only obliquely narrated, serves to merely exemplify that fact that all fictional forms are subject to exception; even a non-narrative might contain a moment of story or plot. 

The film is not entertaining and, indeed, much of it is very tedious.  The acting is generally good, but not flawless.  Patricia Arquette seems uncertain in the early scenes, probably non-plussed by the improvisational character of the film making.  In general, the people have teeth that are much too white and too pretty -- the prevalence of movie-star teeth shown in big close-up in this film is a continual irritant.  In real life, people's teeth are not so white and regular.  Like almost all experimental films that are faithful to the exploration of their hypothesis, that is, actually experimental in form, the picture is much more interesting to read about than to see.  Linklater shoots the movie in completely transparent style -- there are no more than a half-dozen interesting compositions and no special effects.  The editing is completely prosaic and the acting of many of the minor characters is flawed and stilted.  From time to time, Linklater seems to ignore the great moral of his earlier films, particularly Dazed and Confused -- that is, that the secret lives of children and adolescents are mostly about interactions with their peers and that the world of teenagers, in particular, is a place in which adults rarely appear and, when they do appear, are mostly inconsequential.

Most of what we see in the movie is trivial and, after an hour or so, you start to wonder how much longer Linklater can keep this up -- that is, making a film about actions and events that are completely unmemorable, without consequence, and banal.  The film clearly shows us the limit of realism which is tedium -- real life, I'm afraid, is fundamentally boring; that's why we invents fictions, stories to tell ourselves.  But I'm not sure at all that the film is a failure on its own terms and, perhaps, with another viewing I might proclaim this movie an idiosyncratic masterpiece.  I recall the first time that I read Flaubert's A Sentimental Education.  After I had read half the book, I realized I didn't recall anything that I had read.  Flaubert's commitment to realism was so seemingly great that he had portrayed quotidian events in the life of his hero as having no real significance -- hence, there was nothing on which to gain any traction.  The reader is lost and can't figure out why Flaubert is devoting hundreds of pages to chronicle encounters and conversations that seem completely inconsequential.  I had to go back and re-read the novel with more attention.  And, then, suddenly at the end of the book, the pattern is revealed and the reader stands aghast and ashamed at his own impatience and incomprehension.  A Sentimental Education is one of the greatest novels ever written and I think it is a measure of Linklater's perverse accomplishment in Boyhood that I am citing that book in defense, or, at least, in comparison with his movie.