Richard Linklater (2014)
Sometimes when I’ve seen a film I don’t rate highly but which has got excellent reviews, I anxiously search online for a dissenting voice or two to reassure me that I’m not alone, and I can usually find them. (I don’t do the reverse of this: when I like a film that’s been badly received, I don’t need kindred spirits.) Boyhood presents an exceptional challenge: as of today (exactly three months after its release in America), Richard Linklater’s ‘indie epic’ has a 100% approval rating on Metacritic and is 99% ‘fresh’ on Rotten Tomatoes, where only two of the 204 critics’ reviews (from Rebecca Cusey in Patheos and Matt Pais in RedEye) are ‘rotten’. As well as these dissenters, Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times thinks Boyhood ‘at best, OK’, writing perceptively about both the film itself and how it feels to be a critical contrarian. But these negative comments are a drop in the ocean of praise. Many of the favourable reviews see Boyhood not just as a fine film but as a great one – perhaps the best of the decade or even the century. The budget was $4m and the box office takings currently stand at $38m. Boyhood is clearly going to receive many awards to add to the Silver Bear that Linklater won at Berlin earlier this year.
Boyhood is (as far as I know) unique in terms of how it was made: describing the life of a Texan boy, Mason Evans, Jr, from the age of six to the age of seventeen, Richard Linklater, his cast and crew came together for three days’ shooting each year from 2002 to 2013 inclusive. Ellar Coltrane plays Mason throughout these growing years; Linklater’s daughter, Lorelei, plays Mason’s elder sister, Samantha. Boyhood is a dream come true for people who think: wouldn’t it be great if the people in films could actually age? The answer, as far as I’m concerned, is no – I enjoy watching an adult actor and the make-up people take on the challenge of presenting the same character over the number of years that Boyhood spans, and well beyond. But there’s no arguing that young people in films are a particularly suitable case for the Linklater treatment: it would be highly unusual for a director to use the same child actor in the role of someone who progressed from infancy to adulthood in the course of one movie. Boyhood has prompted comparisons with Michael Apted’s Up series, still better known as Seven Up!, in honour of the first of these television documentaries, screened in 1964[1]. The comparison has some validity in terms of Linklater’s approach but none in terms of the viewer’s experience. For those who’ve watched it over the decades, Seven Up! has gained substance through viewers’ memories of earlier interviews with the participants, as well as through resonances with the viewers’ own lives (perhaps particularly if, like me, you’re about the same age as the people in the Apted films). The audience of Boyhood doesn’t have a relationship with the characters any richer than one that develops in the course of any two- or three-hour film that’s watched in a single session. Linklater’s Before trilogy – where the nine-year intervals between films correspond to the number of years the two principals, played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, have aged since we last saw them – are more truly closer to Seven Up! than Boyhood is.
The film relies, though, to a considerable extent on being viewed as if it were a documentary. It’s clear after not too long there won’t be many big dramatic climaxes within particular years of Mason’s life story. When the characters reappear after a move forward in time, you’re struck by changes in appearance, by when Mason’s voice is breaking, and so on; but most of what then follows doesn’t aim to be exciting in the way of a conventional drama. Much of the praise for Boyhood is that it’s ‘like real life’; how much you get out of the film – and, perhaps, how much affection you feel towards Mason Evans’s world – also depends on how much this ‘real life’ chimes with your own experience, either as a child or as a parent. I may have been at a disadvantage in that, apart from a bit where Mason and another kid look and laugh at photographs of underwear in a mail order catalogue, I didn’t find anything in Boyhood which made me think, ‘Yes, that’s just what it was like’. Worse, I was always very relieved, as I watched, that I hadn’t had a life anything like this: I kept thinking how terrible it must be to grow up in a lower middle-class family in Houston – being subjected to ritual social gatherings, expected to whoop support for your team at a baseball game, and so on.
When the action in Boyhood reverts to more familiar dramatic territory, it tends to be crude. At the start of the film, Mason’s parents, Olivia (Patricia Arquette) and Mason Sr (Ethan Hawke), have split up and Olivia is a mature student at Houston University. She marries her psychology professor, Bill Welbrock (Marco Perella) – a particularly badly written character. By the time he and Olivia return from honeymoon in the second year of the story, this pompous bore might as well be an insurance salesman. (Being a professor and being boring are, of course, not mutually exclusive but Bill, once he’s out of the lecture theatre, doesn’t remotely suggest an academic bore.) It’s not enough for him to be a bore, though, and, as such, an unwelcome contrast to Mason and Samantha’s lively, boyish, absent father. Bill must also become a violent drunk. By the time he’s inflicting a savage haircut on Mason, he’s a tyrant stepfather to an almost Mr Murdstone degree – but easily contemptible too: Bill misses a tiny golf putt and petulantly thwacks the green with his club.
Another phoney big moment (although it’s been especially praised by some reviewers) comes near the end of the film, when Mason is preparing to leave home to start college. Olivia decides to tell her son how disappointed she is with how things have turned out for her. Are we meant to think she’s insensitively selfish, choosing this moment to moan (stupidly) about her life being more or less over, now that her younger child is starting higher education? No: it’s simply that Olivia has to have the speech to rhyme with her opening tirade, to a pre-Bill boyfriend, about being someone’s daughter then someone’s mother with nothing in between (and with the result, she bizarrely claims, that she’s never been able to choose what movie to go and see). If this were ‘real life’, Mason would likely (and reasonably) be pissed off by his mother’s parting shot, and she would likely apologise for the unfortunate timing. The very end of Boyhood is artificial in a similar way. Mason arrives at college and immediately goes hiking in Big Bend National Park with his dorm roommate, this boy’s girlfriend, and another girl, called Nicole (Jessi Mechler). Mason and Nicole take an instant shine to one another – enough for Mason to look happily, wonderingly up into the sky, in the film’s closing shot, as his six-year-old self did in its opening one. Boyhood isn’t short of clichés or cloyingness. Mason peeps out from behind a door to listen to his mother’s initial outburst about her lack of independence (although he’d be able to hear her from miles away: why do grown-ups in films never keep their voices down in scenes like this?) When Mason’s had the vicious haircut, courtesy of the academic psychologist, a girl in his class passes Mason a note that says she thinks he looks ‘kewt’.
Sometimes, the eschewal of conventional dramatic shaping does pay off. One summer, Mason goes away with his father on an overnight camp. You’re primed to expect some kind of decisive bonding, which, thank goodness, doesn’t materialise. I liked the way that twelve-year-old Mason, in this sequence, expressed reservations about a sort-of girlfriend because of her lack of feeling for what he considers ‘the films of the summer’ (of 2008: The Dark Knight, Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express) – and how eager and determined he is to respond enthusiastically to his father’s humour. Richard Linklater also conceives some sequences which shouldn’t work but do. Later on, Mason spends a birthday, with Samantha, at the home of the gun-and-bible-toting parents of Annie, who is Mason Sr’s new wife. Although Linklater slides over the tensions inherent in the marriage between Mason Sr, who doesn’t seem in the slightest God-fearing, and a practising Christian from this kind of background, Ethan Hawke and Jenni Tooley, as Annie, convince you that these two people love each other and want to make things work. It’s also effective in this part of the story that, when Annie’s father (Richard Andrew Jones) shows Mason Jr and Samantha how to shoot a rifle, they’re both – whatever they make think about the use of guns – spontaneously excited by getting a shot on target. (This celebration also nicely calls to mind a sequence much earlier in the story, when the children and their father go to a bowling alley.) There’s a scene in which Olivia, in conversation with a plumber’s mate, who’s come to repair a sewer pipe at the family home, encourages the man to get some further education. Years later, she and her children bump into Enrique (Roland Ruiz) in a restaurant that he now manages, thanks to the qualification he earned as a result of Olivia’s advice. The moment is contrived but enjoyable – except that, when Enrique says the family’s lunch is on him, there’s virtually no reaction from the dreary Olivia.
Ellar Coltrane has a genuinely ‘interior’ quality – from an early stage he gives you the sense that Mason is taking in more than he’s giving out, and it’s understandable that Richard Linklater wanted to explore and exploit this quality in the young actor. This is fine to a degree but it seems linked to a facile idea that, when you’re a kid but only when you’re a kid, you’re on the receiving end of what adults have to say. (In fact, if you’re naturally quiet and reasonably polite, you’ll probably find yourself, as you grow older, on this kind of receiving end more and more.) It is convincing, though, when Mason is suddenly much more expansive when he’s talking to a girlfriend (Zoe Graham). As he grows older, Coltrane develops an intriguingly careful walk – as if Mason is continually testing the ground before him. Although I think Boyhood is being greatly overrated, I can understand why it has struck such a chord: it’s been constructed in an extraordinary way yet it speaks to the experience of many people. What I can’t understand is the enthusiasm for Patricia Arquette’s Olivia. (According to the Gold Derby website, she is hot favourite for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.) By the end of the film, I knew nothing about this woman, except that her whining voice could be part of why both Mason Sr’s successors in her life – Olivia’s professor, then one of her students (she progresses from undergraduate studies to an academic post very quickly) – have a drink problem. It seemed to me surprising and, on the writer-director’s part, evasive that neither Samantha nor Mason Jr ever really take their mother to task for the instability of their home life – even if Linklater justifies this by making the son thoughtfully passive and suggesting that the daughter gradually distances herself. Lorelei Linklater is very (I assume intentionally) irritating at the start but I got to like Samantha more and it’s credible that the girl reverts to childish petulance when she feels particularly insecure.
Ethan Hawke’s performance as the father is being relatively underrated: he’s never incongruously theatrical but he enlivens virtually every scene he’s in, right from the start. An opening conversation between Mason Sr and his ex-mother-in-law (Libby Villari) expresses – naturally, economically and incisively – a long history of tensions between them. (I wish Mason Sr’s genetic influence had been stronger in the vocal department: Samantha has inherited something of Olivia’s voice; Mason Jr is also his mother’s son when it comes to monotone.) The actors in smaller roles sometimes seem uneasy at first but settle in with repeat appearances: Richard Robichaux, as the manager of a fast food place where Mason Jr has a summer job, is a good example – Robichaux does well with a little speech at Mason’s high school graduation party. Photographed by Lee Daniel (who’s worked with Linklater several times before), Boyhood is, in the last analysis, interesting as a concept but underpowered as a drama. You pretty well know what’s going to happen (and not happen) – and I didn’t find the characters interesting, or more than occasionally interesting anyway. The idea that the film is deeply moving because you see before your eyes – and experience – the transience of youth defeats me. Boyhood put me in touch with the past in a different way: its 165 minutes are a reminder that, when you’re young, time passes rather slowly.
29 August 2014
[1] According to Wikipedia, Seven Up! was directed by Paul Almond rather than Michael Apted but the latter has directed all the subsequent films in the series.
