Boyhood

Since I write a movie blog, the question does come up from time to time what my favorite movie is.  When one loves movies the way I do, that can be a difficult question to answer.  To make things simpler, I have a pat answer: "American Graffiti."  Perhaps one of the reasons I liked "Boyhood" so much is that it has many of the same sensibilities as "American Graffiti."  What makes "Boyhood" special is that while "American Graffiti" covers one night in the lives of a group of young people, "Boyhood" covers 12 years in the life of a Texas family.  The film maker actually took 12 years to make this film, so we see the young actor who plays the main character grow up in the almost 3 hour film. One wonders how much time must have been spent in the editing room poring over hundreds of hours of film, trying to select the best shots to tell the story that was trying to be told.  Director Richard Linklater might have had a simple story to tell, but he must have had to have a lot of patience and vision to bring it about.  What links "American Graffiti" and "Boyhood" in my mind is how real they both seem.  They both seem to be documentaries, but instead are very effective pieces of fiction.

It makes no sense to call the ordinary extraordinary.  But this movie about ordinary people doing ordinary things is an extraordinary piece of work.  The movie follows young Mason Evans Jr., who we watch from the age of about 6 until he goes away to college.  At the beginning of the film, we quickly discover that Mason's' parents (Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke) are divorced and that his mother has begun a relationship with another man.  Mason's father sees his children rarely at the beginning, but becomes more a part of his kids' lives when his mother moves closer to him.  At first, the father seems like he will fail them.  As the movie goes on, we begin to see that the parents' inability to work things out in their marriage has had serious consequences.  The other men that the mother brings around or marries are all troubled (one of them is an abusive alcoholic), while the father cannot begin to be the same influence because he is not present as much.  As the years go on, it becomes clear that the father had a luxury the mother didn't have:  time to mature.  The film doesn't show why the parents' relationship didn't work out, but it is clear that the mother ends up with the vast majority of the responsibility.  This unfairly allows Mason Sr. to grow up more, marry again and become more stable.  What is interesting to observe is that even though the father is always more immature than the mother, his children (particularly his son) are much more open with him about the struggles they face.  All the while, their mother seems to be able to connect with other people very well (she is successful teacher), but is unable to build a stable home life.  Her children keep their distance, and she keeps ending up in unstable relationships.

One could go on for hours about the complexity of relationships that are depicted in this movie.  The mother and father only have two conversations during the movie that I can remember, and one can find in those two conversations the character development of the parents.  It is also interesting to watch how much Mason's sister seems to thrive at school while Mason struggles.  Mason seems to be more affected by his father's absence, and the more involved his father becomes as the years go by, the more he seems to find a person with whom he can identify.  As the movie ends, he reminds me of many young people: full of promise, unsure of their future, and a little bit shell shocked by their own upbringing.  As I alluded to earlier, the power of this movie is showing ordinary life, the consequences of parents' actions, the possibilities that await us, and the missed opportunities of life that naturally emerge from the choices we make.  It could be that I am so mesmerized by this movie's concept that I am missing its shallowness of story (I did read a film critic who wrote just that), but I think not.  Too often what draws us to film or television is the extraordinary.  We watch things because people have unusual adventures, and that is what draws us to a story.  Here, we have an anti-story.  It is a somewhat normal story, and in a world where all the films around us are bells and whistles, an ordinary story hit home for me.  I could not help but look in the proverbial mirror after this movie.  What choices am I making as a parent that will affect my kids negatively or positively?  How can I do best by my kids?  Any movie that makes one think these kind of thoughts, in my mind, is doing its job.