BOYHOOD (2014)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
Top ten best films of the 2010 era
Reprinted with permission by Steel Notes Magazine
I once saw a short film on HBO, far too many years back to recall the title, about a filmmaker who is making a savagely violent film where a family is attacked and almost killed. Someone on the set reminds the filmmaker that life need not always be depicted as cruel and savage; how about a film about a divorced couple with a family who try to get along? “Boyhood” reminded me of that. This 2-hours-plus revelation is about the maturity of a divorced family, within a 12-year span, and it is everything I love about cinema and everything conventional wisdom says you should hate about independent cinema. There is no distinguishable plot and no character arcs and not much story except the story of a family and how they cope with each other, and learn to live with each other through hardships. To complain, as some have, of a lack of narrative thrust is to dismiss what the film ultimately accomplishes. Call it Scenes from Childhood, or just call it very poetically, “Boyhood.”
The sweet Texas daydreamer Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane, who in the opening scene, is seen staring memorably at the blue sky while lying on school grounds) is the young boy, the son of Olivia and Mason, Sr. (both magnificently played by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke). Lorelei Linklater is Samantha, the sister who likes to tease her brother (they are seen sharing bunkbeds in their early years). Olivia and Mason Sr. are divorcing; the dad hopes to reunite the family as a whole, rather than visiting on selective days of the week. The divorce ensues, years pass, and Olivia marries two other men. One is an alcoholic, highly strict professor (Marco Perella, depicting an unflinching brutality); the other, a former soldier turned corrections officer (Brad Hawkins, showcasing a father who would rather be admired than loved) who expects an older Mason Jr. to respect his curfew. The professor causes discomfort at the dinner table, asks for his own kids and his stepkids to show him their cell phones and, worst of all, forces Mason to have the worst haircut of his life (we kids have all been there - “You’ll look like a man instead of a little girl”). The corrections officer, shown unobtrusively in two scenes drinking a beer, insists that his strict adherence to work and maintaining his family makes him “cool.” Teen Mason’s painted fingernails and earrings do not impress this straight-as-an-arrow husband of Olivia’s life.
Moment by moment, the family faces disruption and instability. Mason Jr. and Samantha always have to switch schools, Olivia is attracted to the wrong kind of men (vicious, drunk, belligerent bullies at best), yet it is Mason’s biological dad who makes amends in his own life and maintains stability -- he gets married for a second time and with a child of his own yet never forgetting his own brethren. Mason’s Dad is the one that we of so little faith deem as a loser in the beginning (some audience members might), living with a band member and smoking pot and driving the same black GTO - I even thought he would disappear from the picture. In fact, he ends up as the most responsible of the bunch.
Olivia also makes amends, hoping to be a “mommy monk, simple, celibate” and selling her home, stating that she is spending the second half of her life getting rid of everything she worked for. It is Mason Sr. who reminds Olivia that she did a good job raising the kids and we believe it because we see it -you feel close to the family and this becomes one of those rare films where we, the observers, becomes as intimate with the family as they are with each other.
The attraction of the movie, its galvanizing power, is that it captures moments in a family’s history - you do not seize the moment, the moment seizes you. The filmed record of more than a decade’s worth is a wonderful novelty, adding immeasurably to the proceedings (Director Richard Linklater actually filmed the kids and the adults consistently for 12 years). “Boyhood” reminds me of the “Up” documentaries of which director Michael Apted followed young kids to their adulthood. “Boyhood” does something more captivating and emotionally grounded - it seizes the honesty of moments, both grand and small, from the acute perspective of kids as they reach puberty and beyond. Those precious moments, all 142 minutes of them, seize us.
