I have never been shy about pointing out what I see as deficiencies for the Academy Awards, but here’s a big one: how did Boyhood not win Best Picture the year it came out? Now, I’ve seen Birdman, the film that did win that year, and would even agree it is also a great film, but the fact that Boyhood even exists in the form it does and is actually a good film is something of a minor miracle that I doubt anyone could successfully duplicate. This was the product of twelve years of the life of writer/director Richard Linklater and his cast and crew. There are so many things that could have gone wrong with this film, and Linklater still managed to pull it off and make a nearly plotless film coherent all by itself should be an accomplishment.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Now comes my own challenge: how do I tackle a film like this in one of my articles?
For the uninitiated, and I somehow wonder why anyone who doesn’t know what Boyhood is would even be doing reading something off my site given the low traffic it receives, Boyhood is the story of a boy growing up in Texas. Mason Evans Jr (Ellar Coltrane) starts the film at age 6 and ends it at age 18. Linklater would gather his cast and crew to do a couple weeks shooting every year for twelve years, and then he cut the whole thing together into the story of Mason’s growing up. Despite how this scenario sounds, Linklater chose not to focus on many of the more traditional hallmarks of growing up. There are few mentions of birthdays. There are no scenes of Mason’s learning to drive or going to the prom. There’s a high school graduation party, but no scenes of the graduation ceremony itself. Even a break-up with his first girlfriend happens between scenes. It’s more of the case where things do happen to Mason, good and bad, as he grows older and more aware of the world around him, but not the ones we might usually expect in a story like this. The closest that I could say there is to recurrent themes is that many times when he is smaller, there are scenes of him and some friends looking at scantily-clad pictures of attractive women. The big difference is the first time it happens, he’s looking in a lingerie catalogue. The second time, he’s using a computer, and though Linklater doesn’t give the audience a good look at his computer screen, my guess is there’s a lot more on display than there is the catalogue. This is not really a film with a plot. Instead, it’s a film about a character’s growth.
And it isn’t just Mason. There’s also his parents Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) and Olivia (Patricia Arquette, who earned that Best Actress Oscar here), and even his older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter). The film opens with the parents already separated with Mason Sr. as a sort of unemployed musician with some outspoken left-leaning politics and Olivia as the responsible parent trying to put herself through school and take care of the kids aside from the odd weekends her ex-husband has custody. Samantha may have less development than the others, but there are moments, such as when Mason Sr. gives her a birds-and-the-bees sort of talk when she’s starting to date boys, Mason there for the chat, where the embarrassment must have been at least somewhat real as her real father wrote the scene and directed it. But in many ways, Olivia and Mason Sr. are as much growing as people as their son is getting older.
Mason Sr. arguably has the better arc (if that is the right word). When the film starts, he’s driving a muscle car and is little better than a big kid himself. But his advice to his kids isn’t generally awful, and he probably gives Mason Jr. the best possible pointers for talking to girls that the lad ever got. But then at a certain point, he gets remarried, ditches the muscle car to Mason’s disappointment (Junior thought the car would be his someday), and has a third child. While there’s still signs of the youthful wannabe rebel there, he’s mature enough now to know he needs a real job to support his family, especially since it is rather obvious his new wife and her parents are a lot more traditional than he is. Case in point, Mason Sr.’s in-laws give Mason Jr. a Bible and a shotgun for his 15th birthday, something that strikes me as the most Texan of all possible gifts, though keep in mind I grew up in New Jersey, and Mason Sr. is the one to teach his kids how to shoot. There’s a chance Mason Sr. matures more than Mason Jr., and that may be due to the fact Mason Sr. actually had a lot more growing up to do than his son.
As for Olivia, while she grows professionally, becoming a college instructor in psychology, she has set-backs in other ways as the romantic relationships she forms always seem to be with men who turn out to be abusive alcoholics. Her second marriage to older professor Bill (Marco Perella) goes really ugly really fast at least in terms of screentime, and the essential tragedy of it is that when it comes time, Olivia is more than able to get her own two kids out of that house, the same can’t be said for Bill’s own two children, forced to stay in the house of a man who became an abusive alcoholic. Yes, Samantha can ask about her former step-siblings, but there isn’t much that can be done about it. Maybe that experience is why Olivia’s next relationship with a man who drinks more than he initially led on ended a lot more abruptly: she recognized the signs. Olivia, however, is the only one who seems to recognize the passing of time. By the film’s end, she’s living alone and somewhat unhappy about it while recognizing she won’t be responsible for her two children anymore.
There’s also this feeling towards the end that, whatever happened before the film started between Olivia and Mason Sr., they are both rather civil towards each other. There’s one argument to be seen in the entire film between the two, and it’s early on. I don’t know that I would go so far as to say they support each other in their own individual ways, but they can both take a moment at Mason’s graduation to remark on how their kids turned out with whatever guidance they each gave, and neither seems to be thinking the other deserves less credit for that. Plus, for all that Mason Sr. seems like something of an unemployed manchild at the start of the film, he’s also the best man Olivia had any sort of relationship with in the entire film. The fact that she’s given more gratitude from a restaurant manager she once gave some advice to when he was doing work on her house that she seems to barely remember also seems to hit harder than what her own kids are like towards her. Neither Mason nor Samantha are bad kids or anything, but they, like most people their age, don’t really realize what their parents did for them as they grew up.
However, this is still Mason’s story. What does he get out of this twelve year span of his life? It’s hard to say in part because life doesn’t really have storyarcs. We grow as people, hopefully for the better, as a result of our experiences and whatever lessons lie in our paths, and then we become who we are. Who is Mason? He’s a young man who lived through some rough times, whether it was his mother’s finances or various abusive boyfriends, a bad break-up, and even the standard childhood disappointments, but he also received praise for his artistic eye as he developed as a photographer. He’s got his father’s more easygoing charm with his mother’s work ethic. There’s a feeling at the end that he may be fine, sitting down on a patch of desert, his first night away at college, as an attractive young woman he’s just met looks at him. She thinks we don’t live in the moment so much as moments live in us. Mason agrees. Roll credits.
But is that the message of the film? Linklater doesn’t exactly say when one year in Mason’s life begins or ends, so the different scenes could all be those moments, but at the same time, that does sound like the sort of half-assed philosophy an 18 year old might spout and think it’s wisdom. Granted, it’s not a bad thought, but Mason and Nicole have only just met, and while I could even think based on looks that they share that they might give dating a try, this is the end of the film and possibly Mason’s childhood right here. And quite frankly, life doesn’t have messages so much as what you or I get out of it.
The fact that Linklater was able to put together a film like this is just amazing to me. Given changes in pop culture and technology, I would imagine he never had more than a vague idea how the film’s story (such as it is) was going to turn out as he went along, but I think I can see how Mason turned out the way he did. A work like this had to be a passion project for Linklater, a man who had other films come out during this twelve year period, one where apparently he told frequent collaborator Hawke that, if something happened to Linklater, Hawke would need to finish the project. It’s a film where there are no markers from one year to the next, and only a handful of scenes–Mason and Sam putting up Obama campaign signs in 2008, a Harry Potter book release–really sets the story in any particular time period. And yet, this is still a beautiful piece of work that should stand as one of the greatest successful experiments in the history of American cinema. For that alone, Linklater earned a spot as one of film’s great innovators if for no other reason than I don’t think there’s any other director working today who would have even tried to pull this off. But the guy behind the Before trilogy? Oh yeah. He would.
NEXT: Speaking of films that took years to finish and somehow turned out spectacular, the next entry is one where the long production time was not something anyone making it saw coming, and it takes a very different look at how experiences shape a person. I’m referring to 1979’s Apocalypse Now.
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