What? Never heard of Boyhood? It's a shame because much like two of my other favorite movies this year (Chef, Snowpiercer) it is not widely known. Boyhood is the culmination of the truly ambitious project started by director Richard Linklater. He began twelve years ago the story of a six year old boy and his life. He then would stop filming and pick up the story where he left off a year later until the boy was eighteen. We get to see this kid, and in the beginning he is an actual child, grow up to become an adult... and it's wonderful.
I honestly didn't know what type of movie to expect when entering the theater. I knew the premise and I know the director, but I wasn't sure what route he was going to take with the filming the same kid every year gimmick. I assumed it would be a series of birthday vignettes, however it is a logical, cohesive and fantastic story of one boy's journey from boy to man. We begin with 6 year old Mason. He's a normal kid, kinda quiet, living with his single mother (Patricia Arquette) and sister Sam. His dad (Ethan Hawke) is somewhat of a deadbeat dad, but not in the Hollywood sense. He's the deadbeat dad in the real-life sense in that he kinda took off on his family, but he feels guilty about it, does, indeed, love his children and is very much trying to make up for the lost time. Mason grows up in different houses depending on who his mother is banging/married to at the time. He splits time between his mom and dad's house and deals with being a boy and having an older sister.
What's almost surprising about the film is that it tries very hard to be as accurate and non-Hollywood as possible in the telling of a boy's life. There is no major twists and turns. There is no moment of Mason was messing around in the garage and accidentally cut off his own leg. Or Dad was just fooling around with the kids in order to get money and then split once more. Or even the portrayal of each age Mason goes through. It's all very realistic. He's a normal child going through what, sadly now, is more or less a normal childhood. His mother does his best to raise both of them while juggling work and going back to school. His dad does his best to give him advice, be his friend, but still maintain the integrity that a father should employ. It's been engrained into our heads that there needs to be these huge emotional scenes of surprise in order to tell a legacy of someone's life and I found myself trying to predict when something truly screwed up was going to happen to Mason or someone he loved. But it never did. Just as it never did in my life as well.
This is why I enjoyed watching Mason's story much more when he's a child up until right before his teens. He's a curious boy, doing little boy things, with little boy interests learning from everyone around him. He watches as his mom goes from a pushover with a (surprisingly well done and not over the top) abusive boyfriend to a strong-willed independent woman and mother. The child actor must've had a lot of input in deciding what to film with Linklater because nothing about his childhood seemed faked. It didn't seem like an adult writing a script with dialogue he thinks a child would say or scenes he thinks a child would experience. It all seemed very organic and natural and it was a delight to sit and watch.
However, as much as I thoroughly loved watching Mason mature into an adolescent, once he hits his teens years, the movie became a little more difficult to stomach... in a good way. Here's what I mean by this... Mason's quietness matures him into an almost emo teenager. He's still good-hearted and we still like him, but he becomes a typical 2010s teenager. The aspects of his life that he thinks are important have little importance to me as an adult. The conversations he has as a teenager and the outlook he has on life and all of the moments he has as a teenager that he would consider "deep" are complete bullshit. Because that's what a teenager is! They're terrible and certainly close to unwatchable when being portrayed accurately on screen. It's not that we start to dislike Mason as a person, we just know that he is now a teenager. Teenagers suck in real life. Therefore, Mason sucks at this point. It's almost laughable the scenes of him older because everything about his life is great, yet he can only see the darkness. Or poignant moments he experiences won't mean a thing ten years after the film. The fact that Linklater was able to so closely and accurately depict the emotions and feelings and whinings of the typical American teenager was astounding. I didn't loathe these scenes because the movie started dragging on and falling short... I was starting to loathe each scene because they were done so perfectly. This is a very strange dynamic of the film that I highly respect.
At nearly three hours, this film is worth every dime of your admission price. Ironic that I saw it during a movie hopping session. It was a highly ambitious journey that for all intents and purposes shouldn't have succeeded in becoming a near perfect portrayal of boyhood. With studios and budgets and timing, there were a million ways for this movie to fail, but it doesn't. It's one of the best movies of this year and I highly recommend it to almost anyone.
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