Boyhood
“Boyhood (2014)”
Text By: Basil Swartzfager
Original Publication Date: August 6th, 2014
For me the most interesting aspect of Boyhood is the dichotomy between its two structures. On the one hand, we have the forward movement of the narrative. Due to the nature of the film's construction, we have a character that is very literally progressing through time. Most films are shot out of continuity, so that the beginning of the movie may have been shot last, the end first, or any millions of varieties. Boyhood, probably more than any other movie ever made, shows us a character moving through time, so that each scene we see was made after the one that preceded it. That character exists in an approximation of real time, and we see that character age.
This facet of forward progression then rubs up against the actual scenes themselves, which feel far more like a collection of unsorted memories an older person might have looking back at their childhood than the events that would seem important to a child as they are happening. This fragmentation helps explain how a character can go from a seemingly nice man to a drunken, heteronormative jerk in the space of a single scene. Boyhood lacks a progression of emotional relationships, except in the central four characters (though Patricia Arquette is given short shrift compared to the other three). In some ways this structure works for the film -- and reminded me of melancholy moments in my own childhood -- as when the characters have to move and Mason catches a brief glimpse of his best friend riding a bike and that's the last time he sees him. Or in an extended walking conversation between teenage Mason and a female character we never see again, chatting about another character's hospitalization and her uncertainty about what to do. These moments use the fragmentation of the narrative, the emphasis on the seemingly random and banal spikes of memory that jut to the surface of our brains when we think of our past, to their advantage in creating a film of beautifully minor quotidian details.
The two aspects that keep the film in the category of "good" rather than "great" in my mind are its length, and the often clunky way it juxtaposes these minor moments with larger ones. Regarding the first piece, I guess most people will think I thought the movie was too long. But in actuality I didn't think it was long enough. When I first heard the film's concept, and that Linklater was going to be responsible, I thought the film would be his usual length (1.5-maybe 2 hours). When I heard that it was almost three hours my first thought was, "Great. But wouldn't it be amazing if it was five hours?" After watching the movie I still feel that way. The scenes are rapidly paced. This combines with their sense of self-containment to give the film a breeziness that made its 165 minutes feel shorter than most 100 minute movies. I could have easily sat in the theatre for another two hours watching scenes like the ones I had seen. I think it would have given the film a sense of fullness, a languorous quality that imbued the viewer with a sense of a total childhood lived. Or at least as close an approximation as a film entertainment is capable of.
The second aspect keeping it from greatness has to do with the way that Linklater handles the big moments. In giving them equal weight as those smaller pieces, it makes them feel awkwardly stitched in and melodramatic. The tone bumps up against the more relaxed, lived-in moments that ring true to life. When the drunken stepfather goes from a sleazy professor hitting on Mason's mom right in front of him to a screaming physical abuser, I don't think any person in the theatre felt satisfied with his character arc. There are certain realities of life that movies aren't equipped to handle in a short amount of time, and domestic violence has to be near the top. I have almost never seen it handled carefully enough, and with sufficient depth, to make its inclusion in a film not seem exploitative. Boyhood doesn't even come close. The scene when Mason walks in to find his mother on the floor, drunken stepfather standing over her, takes a movie primarily focused on small moments and explodes it into a television soap opera. The beats the follow do not feel like any single person’s lived experience, but the experience of movie characters working through fictional drama. The audience doesn’t need a reason this large for Patricia Arquette to leave her husband. The film has already been supplying us with many small reasons that escalated to this enormous one. If only the four main characters are going to have developed character arcs, then don’t even bother giving the other characters arcs at all.
An example of a better way that Linklater handles these ancillary characters comes in the second stepfather. I still find the balance a little off, so that his character is not fully satisfying, but it’s much closer to the elliptical structure of the rest of the film. He appears in one scene, offering an unexpected insight into experiences as a soldier in the Iraq war. He seems introspective, tough but nice, and like a character who represents one of Linklater’s pet interests (criticizing Bush and the way the war was bungled) but also comes off like a human. Later he takes a heteronormative jab at Mason’s nail polish, then the next time we see him he’s drunk and accosting Mason for breaking curfew. Then he’s gone from the movie, the separation and divorce implied through absence and a few lines of dialogue. Because of the beats he comes off as having transformed from a human into a jerk (it would have been better to show another scene with him being a decent guy, so that the film better implied that these two halves exist in the same person) but there’s no need for a big confrontation scene. The scenes that are there imply discord in the spaces, and our minds fill in the gap.
This, I believe, is where the film is strongest. The capacity to suggest so much, to activate the audience’s brain and fill in the spaces of an entire childhood. In nearly three hours we see a lot, but when the film works it reminds us of everything we don’t see, and the way that memory clouds over time so that we have to work to pull out the pieces. Which is maybe why I wish the film was longer. I want to remember everything I’ve forgotten, and I want Boyhood to be able to remind me. It can’t, of course, but what it manages to suggest resonated with me in spite of its missteps.
-Basil Swartzfager, 2014
