Film Friday: Boyhood

The "gimmick" behind Richard Linklater's newest film, Boyhood, is that Linklater conceived the project as one that would evolve as his child cast got older.  Reflecting on his daughter Lorelei's entrance into elementary school, Linklater approached IFC for funding for a longitudinal project consisting of fictionalized incidents of his central characters' growing up.  Thus, Ellar Coltrane plays the central character, Mason, from the age of 6 to 18, and Lorelei plays Mason's older sister Samantha (but note the film's title; don't be confused about whose story this is). Linklater and his crew -- which had the daunting task of shifting film technlologies -- filmed the action over a period of a few days every so often for the dozen years it took to watch Mason grow from a kid to a college freshman.

So, the gimmicky stuff: well, Coltrane's pretty impressive as he responds to the world around him, and there are times where you think, he must be really biologically related to Ethan Hawke, who plays his father. Hawke, and Patricia Arquette, Mason's mother, also show their age over time, and give remarkably credible performances. I like that the transitions are relatively subtle, as we move from one period in Mason's life to the next, and what's also impressive is how there are characters who come and then go in his life, never to return, like the step-siblings Mason and Samantha had from Mom's second marriage (which ends because those kids' father -- once Mom's college professor -- is an alcoholic).  That's how things are for Mason; even his dad comes and goes, unable to hold steady, except for his GTO, which the boy adores. 

This is the thing that comes across the most in the film: Mason is of a generation that is very temporary, in the sense that they are less rooted in place and even time. Mason and Samantha don't assume that their lives will be totally secure, that they will find an employer who will give them a job for their entire lives, the way that their grandparents' generation would have assumed. If Mason's seeming indifference -- or perhaps, diffidence -- to the world around him is inexplicable to the adult figures who try to give him advice, like his high school photography teacher, or his boss at a local diner (figures who do like him and mean well, it should be noted), it's not surprising, given his background and given the very unstable era in which he lives.  Near the end of the film, first-day freshman Mason remarks, they say we should seize the day, but what if the day really seizes you? He -- and the pretty girl he's just met -- both recognize that there is a lot out of their control.

Is that why technology is so important to Mason, from the early video game consoles to the digital  cameras?  (One of the cooler things about the film is to watch the switches from the ancient Atari and Nintendo consoles to the Game Boy/XBOX/Wii.)  Watch the way he handles those old joysticks, seeking order in his world.  Digital photography also makes sense for Mason, allowing him to keep distance and remake the world he sees. As a boy, Mason often stares out a classroom window, getting chided for it. (Indeed early on there is much tension between him and Sam, who is the Perfect Student, always seeking motherly approval until the teen years.) Teachers worry about his lack of focus, but once he gets the digital camera -- a gift from his mother's third husband -- it gives him at least some sense of purpose, though he still prefers the quietude of reflection.

Boyhood is a lot like Linklater's other talky films, notably the Before trilogy, which has followed the characters of Jesse and Celine from their early twenties to their middle ages.  The film does not have some specific narrative structure; it is a series of moments that the cast and director seized, as it were.  The conversations work when they are most "real," most true to life: this is what kids and their parents do, and some of it's charming, and some of it's not pretty. (The alcoholic stepdad, played by Marco Perella, is in some was more believably menacing as he criticizes Mason and his stepbrother than when his boozing  becomes out in the open.) The acting, too, has compelling moments: Lorelei Linklater's irrational teenaged rage at her mother is note-perfect; the look of dejection on Coltrane's face when he finds out that his father has sold that GTO -- which he had "promised" to Mason when the boy was in 3rd grade -- in order to buy an SUV for his wife and newborn son, is one of quiet heartache. At Mason's graduation, Hawke and Arquette have an awkward exchange about ex-husbands and new wives, and when Hawke leaves to find his wife's purse to give Arquette money as a thank-you-and-sorry, Arquette's expression tells a full story: you finally have become the man I wanted you to be, but with some other woman and for some other baby.

Arquette has perhaps the most difficult role, since she is the one who must react to all the males in her life fucking up and leaving her hanging. It is her resilience that does give a model for her children to hang onto, even if they don't recognize it as such. (Teenagers don't recognize anything, since of course, the already know everything and their parents are morons.  I am a parent, yes.) I do wonder if there is a certain amount of sexism in how Linklater creates Olivia, though Arquette does shape that role, too. She does have a lot of bad things happen to her, but is Linklater saying that it's her fault in some way, or is it just bad luck.  (As Lou Reed put it in "Street Hassle": some people don't have a choice/ and they can never have a voice,/ to talk with, that they can really call their own/so the first thing that they see that allows them the right to be/why, they follow it, /you know it's called: baaad luck." ) It certainly is real, that women like Olivia have to do the dirty work of parenting, and that moment when Mason leaves for college and she says it's the worst day of her life is powerfully true for so many mothers.  (One of the producers on the film says she almost word for word said this to her daughter when she left home.)

The one element about the sense of the temporary about Mason's life is that despite spending nearly three hours with him, I don't know if I connect with him, they way I do with his mother, or his sister, and not the way I so tightly connected to Jesse and Celine in Before Sunrise. (Had there never been another film about those two, I think their lives still would matter more to me than Mason's does.) Am I too removed from my own youth?  Is Coltrane to blame? (I like him, actually, and the experiment in acting continuity is put to the test for all the actors, and they more or less come through.) I just have a feeling it's not going to be as central to the Linklater filmography as it probably should be.