When Mason (Ellar Coltrane) turns 16, his divorced father (a ne’er-do-well played with loose-limbed likability by Linklater-regular Ethan Hawke) fails to give him what he wants: the old man’s classic GTO. Mason doesn’t merely want it, you understand, he fully expects it, because his father, as Mason remembers very clearly, promised that it would be his on his 16th birthday. His dad not only has no memory of making such a promise, he finds it preposterous that he ever could have made it, and what’s more, he just sold the car anyway. What he gives Mason instead, after fumbling for a delicate balance between defending himself and consoling his heartbroken son, is a mix CD of songs recorded by the four solo Beatles in the years after their break-up, which he painstakingly put together, he explains, in such a way that it may as well be a Beatles album, a kind of jury-rigged reunion, with songs sequenced so as to simulate an evening out with the band: Paul gets things started by taking you to a party, where you run into George, who wants to talk to you about God; then John grabs your ear for a serious yet witty conversation about love and pain, before Ringo finally comes to the rescue to remind you to enjoy what you have while you have it. It’s the Beatles experience condensed and distilled. Mason’s dad calls his mix the Black Album.
BOYHOOD is Richard Linklater‘s Black Album, constructed not out of songs, but out of twelve years of Mason’s life, filmed over the course of twelve years of Ellar Coltrane’s life. The Beatles are, of course, the most famous, most beloved band of all time, and Linklater’s use of them underlines his film’s bid for universalism: Mason isn’t just a boy, with a story, he is an everyboy, and this is meant to be every boy’s story. Not a documentary — this is a feature film, and a work of fiction — BOYHOOD is an artfully compiled sequence of days in the life of someone who “really” exists and someone who exists only as a composite, a character, a gently awesome demonstration of our innate impulse to craft stories — and selves — out of the chaos of one thing after another. Perhaps there isn’t much difference in the reality quotient between actor and character after all. Think about it, maaan. Do we remember the events of our lives as they actually happened? Or are we artists, editors — even mad scientists, now more than ever, putting together our own private Frankensteins and giving them our names? Linklater has been indulging, often winningly, less often tediously, in this kind of dorm-room ontology since the very beginning of his career, but BOYHOOD feels like something of a summa, embedding familiar meditations on the mutability of time, self, and memory within a set of unfolding time-lapse images of one body and (at least) two lives as they were lived and grew and changed.
The most obvious conceptual companion to BOYHOOD in Linklater’s oeuvre is his trilogy (and counting?) of films about strangers/talkers/lovers/spouses Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Hawke again). Stretched out over almost twenty years, these films (BEFORE SUNRISE, BEFORE SUNSET, and BEFORE MIDNIGHT) track their pair of pilgrims’ progress as they move towards and away from the idea and the fact of making their lives together. Rejoining them again every nine years or so has required us to accomodate the shock of their aging, along with its uncomfortable intimations of our own, but the effect is subtle compared to the novelty of watching the actors in BOYHOOD (all of them, of course, not only Ellar Coltrane) age twelve years in under three hours. My suspicion is that, in time, as the new film’s novelty wears off, the trilogy’s ongoing account of Jesse and Celine will come to be seen as a deeper, more substantial investigation than Mason’s story, which, while terrifically engaging and sympathetic, suffers in comparison due to its relative paucity of really good talk. The BEFORE trilogy received comparisons to Eric Rohmer’s work, famous for its characters’ brainy, discursive prolixity. No such comparisons are likely to be leveled at BOYHOOD.
BOYHOOD has created a lot of excitement among critics, and is likely to be a grower among audiences throughout the summer, spreading out from cinephile circles to eventually encompass more or less everyone who likes to watch movies — still a sizable group, our blessed “golden age of television” notwithstanding. A big-hearted film with some interesting ideas in its head, not to mention an unsurprisingly convincing sense of place (utterly Texas, with a fondness sidelining in light mockery) and a beautifully, even mesmerizingly well-realized central conceit, there is no question that it deserves both its hype and its likely success. All the same, I have this collection of pins just sitting here; it would be a shame not to pop something with them.
A great deal has been made of the film’s poetic, deliberate, relatively melodrama-free approach to Mason’s coming-of-age. In fact, this description is misleading, or at least incomplete. Although BOYHOOD is indeed often subtle and naturalistic, allowing conversations to meander and time to simply elapse without major incident — as I hear is typical in many people’s lives (my own non-stop highlight-reel of a life appears to be the exception, sadly enough) — it bogs down repeatedly in lengthy soap operatic interludes, most prominently during passages depicting Mason’s mom’s (Patricia Arquette) second husband’s (Marco Perella) descent into abusive alcoholism and its plenty-melodramatic fallout for the family.
This is not a movie, as some have suggested (usually with admiration), in which “nothing happens.” It means to, and does, relate the milestones in Mason’s life, and secondarily, in the life of his family, including his older sister, Samantha, played by Linklater’s own daughter, Lorelei (who asked her father, when she was 12 years old and either bored or mortified, whether he would consider letting her character die). There are hackneyed moments — sometimes in the hapless way that real life can be hackneyed, but occasionally in ways that elicit comparison with after-school specials or Lifetime movies.
During these longueurs, the film relies heavily on the (very reliable) fascination of simply watching its characters age “before our very eyes,” as well as the inevitably nostalgic charge of seeing the recent history of American life recapitulated, from politics (the Iraq War, the Obama campaign) and popular music (from Coldplay to Daft Punk) to literature (from Harry Potter to … well, Kurt Vonnegut, actually) and video games (from an old Game Boy through the first Xbox and onward to the Wii). Except for the somewhat awkward and forced sermons about Bush and Iraq, these are all inserted unostentatiously into the episodic narrative. It’s one thing to try to recreate, as many films do, aesthetic and technological shifts taking place in the broader culture — the evolution of cell phones is also worth mentioning in this regard — but it’s somehow something else to know that these artifacts were shot while they were a part of the present moment, iterations of the most current generation, inhabiting their own fleeting share of the restless now. They contribute to the ambient wistfulness of the whole film’s unrushed rush towards Mason’s goofy, perfectly stoned, but earned and resonant closing epiphany about time. He’s both right in front of us and already gone, just like everything else — a non-magic trick, like cinema, lighting up, lighting out, and fading back to black.
7/17 // Opened at the Kendall
7/25 // Opening all over the place
166 Minutes
KENDALL SQUARE CINEMA
ONE KENDALL SQUARE
CAMBRIDGE, MA 02139
