thoughts on Boyhood

On the bookshelves in my apartment, I have more than thirty photo albums.  I got my first one and started filling it with photos when I got my first camera at age seven, and most recently added pictures in late June of this year.  On occasion, I have gone through them looking for a specific picture or pictures and been struck how, in some ways, it seems that I am living the same year over and over.  In multiple albums, there are pictures, for example, of me decorating Christmas cookies at my parents' house.  There are multiple pictures of groups of friends sitting around dinner tables on Thanksgiving, plates full of turkey and green bean casserole and mashed potatoes.  Often, it is difficult to tell when specific pictures were taken; you can tell, maybe, by hairstyles or glasses or the absence or presence of people who have drifted in and out of my life.  And yet...there are enough photos of things that only happened once, or only happened for awhile, or people that I'll probably never see again to let me know that while life is, in fact, organized by certain holidays and traditions that do happen over and over again, it's not the same year over and over.  Friendships start and end.  New hobbies are taken up.  Vacations are taken.  I move to different places and so do other people.  People are born and people die.  And some of the most important events aren't captured on film.

The experience of watching Richard Linklater's Boyhood, which follows Mason (Ellar Coltrane) as he ages from six to eighteen, was similar to the experience of flipping through those old photo albums.  This is not because most of the events selected from Mason's life are ones that would be caught on film, but because of the things that change and the things that stay the same as he ages.  His parents and sister are consistently part of his life, and a few other people pop up again and again, but others-- neighbors, friends, stepfathers, and eventually girlfriends-- come and go.  He moves with his mom and sister  from a two-bedroom apartment to a three-bedroom apartment to a house that his first stepfather owns to a house that his mom buys herself to his first dorm room.  He plays video games on systems that change over the years and becomes more and more interested in, and more and more skilled at, photography.  His father (Mason Sr., played by Ethan Hawke) spends a lot of Mason's life pulling up in a GTO to pick him and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) up for weekend visits, then eventually gets remarried and trades the GTO in for a mini-van.  His mother (Olivia, played by Patricia Arquette) earns her Bachelor's and Master's degrees, eventually begins teaching at the college level, and, along the way, marries and divorces men who seem great at first but turn out not to be.  The audience is reminded that time is moving forward not only by the ages of the characters, but by changes in technology, by current events (Mason Sr. rails against President George W. Bush early in the film and later takes his kids with him to campaign for Obama), and by pop culture (Olivia reads to Mason and Samantha from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone early in the film; later, Mason and Samantha dress up in costume to go get their copies of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire).

The film has a good heart.  There are some unpleasant and even terrifying moments in Mason's life (such as when Stepfather #1 drives him, Samantha, and his stepbrother and stepsister around drunk); he crosses paths with some bad people and even has experienced his first heartbreak by the end of the film.  Yet the core characters in the film-- Mason, Samantha, Mason Sr., and Olivia-- seem to be flawed but good people.  Olivia succeeds in her educational and professional goals but consistently falls for the wrong men.  Mason Sr. starts out roaring up in his GTO, taking the kids to do fun activities and forgetting not to swear around them, and then disappearing again, but eventually grows up, starts a second family, and becomes a more stable and consistent presence in the children's lives.  At one point, I was concerned that all of the men in Mason's life (which include his father, the two stepfathers he has over the years, a photography teacher, and a boss) seemed to be jerks, but then his father matures, and the teacher and boss wind up challenging him in ways that are good for him.  Again, Mason has some bad experiences and meets some bad people, but it's not a bad life, all in all. 

There are a few moments in the film that are just incredibly nice, moments when you are allowed to feel genuinely happy for the characters.  One of these is a section of the film in which Mason Sr., his wife, Annie (Jenni Tooley), and his infant son Cooper (Landon Collier) pick Samantha and Mason up and take them to visit Annie's parents.  The scene in which Mason Sr. and his new family pull up is the first in which the audience is introduced to Annie and Cooper, and we see immediately that Samantha and Mason are close with both of them.  It is Mason's fifteenth birthday, and Annie's parents proudly give Mason his first Bible and a shotgun that Annie's father tells him has been passed down in his family for generations.  The gifts aren't anything Mason would really want, but it's incredibly sweet how much Annie's parents want Mason Sr.'s kids to be included in their family.  Mason Sr.'s gifts are incredibly sweet and fatherly, too-- his first love is music (though he eventually gets a stable job in insurance), and he has painstakingly arranged all of the Beatles members' solo work into a "Black Album" for Mason, as well as bought him a shirt, tie, and jacket for things like school dances and job interviews.  It's just a really nice moment in the characters' lives-- Mason Sr. has clearly pulled himself together and is happy and surrounded by good people, and his kids are happy for him and accepting of the changes in his life. 

Olivia gets a nice moment, as well.  At one point, we see her tell a young man who is doing some work on her house that he is smart and should go to college.  A few years later, she runs into him again, and he greets her by telling her, "You probably don't remember me, but you changed my life."  He has finished community college and is working on his Bachelor's degree.  We see Olivia have a few "What am I doing?" or "Why does any of this matter?" moments over the course of the film, and even her own kids, who spend much more time with her than they do their father, are sometimes hard on her.  It's nice to see someone directly tell her that she's really done something right.

I really liked it.  The filming of the movie was spread out over twelve years, which gives it, for lack of a better word, a more genuine feel than the film might have if the same story was told with different actors playing the children over the years and the adults being made to look as if they were aging.  The pop culture, current events, and technology feel more authentic than they often do in movies set in the past, as well; some movies set in the past make such references in sort of a winky-winky way (again, for lack of a better term), like, "Oh, hey, remember when everyone was really into Harry Potter?  Remember when Facebook became a thing?  Remember when Obama was running for President?" Such references don't feel that way here; they seem like genuine reminders of what the world was like in 2002...and 2008...and so on.  I also like that we see some of the "big" moments in Mason's life (his graduation party, for example) but not all; we also see a fair number of days that are not necessarily ordinary, but that wouldn't necessarily appear in any photo album.  Because, after all, that's how most days are.