Sunday, February 08, 2015

ON TO OSCAR, 4.

(See previous reviews of American Sniper, Birdman, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.)

Boyhood. A boy grows up in suburban Texas. And that’s pretty much the movie.

There are crises — the boy’s mother marries a crazy, mean drunk; the boy gets picked on a bit at school; the boy’s first real girlfriend breaks up with him, etc. But what most other filmmakers would naturally parlay into drama, Richard Linklater just makes into scenes. Linklater’s not into drama, or even plot: In his own words, “our lives don’t have plot so much as they have character and a time structure.”

This is the sort of thing we expect from Frenchmen and normally I’m wary of it, but the movie held my interest. When an artist has something on his mind, character and time structure may be enough.

So what does Linklater have on his mind? He seems to want us to identify with some experience that means a lot to him, like the stoned 70s high-school valedictory of Dazed and Confused. In the case of Boyhood this is not a hard ask, because the milieu covers a broad American ground: the family is suburban but not financially secure, and their status wobbles between comfort and struggle; their habits and habitats (high school, malls, cars, parks) are familiar; the setting has some flavor of Texas but could be anywhere in the Big Middle. It’s no more than a short reach up or down for most of us who would wind up seeing the movie.

If that sounds a little bland and characterless and pitched-down-the-middle, you’re not wrong. For a slice-of-life, Boyhood doesn’t have a lot of the details that, in the best examples of the genre, would stick like burrs — no Scorsese espresso cups nor Ozu teacups, no rituals that gain resonance over time. There’s some feeling for cluttered children’s bedrooms and Austin tyro crash pads, but not a lot; the movie moves quickly through its 12-year span and doesn’t let us steep in anything very long.

This is, I think, by design; the movie is more about change than about permanence. But there can be something about change that sticks to the soul, too. And here’s where Childhood’s famous stunt — having one kid, Ellar Coltrane, play the lead, Mason, from age six to 16, and pausing the film to age along with him — is actually a bigger stroke of genius that it at first looks.

Note that with all the praise the movie is getting, no one is saying much about Coltrane’s performance. The fact is, he’s not that much of an actor. He could be one — he’s perfectly natural, even attractive. But he doesn’t have the same ego-push you find in child actors (and indeed in adult actors), because he hasn't learned or been trained to assert himself. As Mason, he’s rather passive, in just the way that you might expect a kid with the upbringing posited in the film to be, even in scenes where he’s at the center of the action. And that suits the picture's purposes fine: He’s just a boy, not yet grown — and not one of those miraculous boys of legend who rise to meet challenges, with daddy's rifle or Horatio Alger gumption, but a real boy of the modern American system — insulated from challenge and looking for the next thing.

One of my very favorite scenes in the movie involves teenage Mason coming home later than he promised from a date and confronting his mother’s live-in, Jim, who’s been drinking and doesn’t appreciate the kid’s disrespect toward his mother. This could be a “dramatic” scene, and we’ve seen versions of it a million times in movies. Only in this case, the kid isn’t going for it. He knows the man doesn’t have any authority over him — and if he tried to act as if he did (and he doesn’t — Jim also knows that much), that would be something to ride out rather than engage. Just like the drama with the mean-drunk husband, and the bad kids at school; whatever anguish it might mean for others, for the boy it’s just another growing pain. The choice he makes -- to blow the guy off and walk into the house -- is absolutely right, and probably not what any Hollywood screenwriter would have cooked up for him.

Other scenes have this same dynamic. The kid’s girlfriend betrays him, and he’s pissy with her about it — and he looks like an ineffectual jerk, as of course he would. When Mason is packing for college and disdains to take one particular nostalgic tchotchke, his mother (Patricia Arquette, ascending to a whole new level of magnificence) breaks down, and the kid isn’t particularly good about it — not mean, not weird, just self-involved and unable to engage his mother except on an adolescent level that has nothing to do with her grown-up pain.

I think this is why I stuck with the movie even without a plot to be pulled by, and even without liking the kid very much (how could I? He’s too much like I was at his age). I can’t even imagine our great poets of adolescence — Wedekind, Rimbaud, Paul Westerberg, the guy who wrote River’s Edge — catching this aspect of boyhood without gilding the lily. For all Boyhood's faults, Linklater's trick caught lightning in a bottle.

(I will add that it occurred to me at the end, when the kid is sitting at the park with his new college friends, that the whole movie might be a vision produced by the drugs he took -- and that the psilocybin candy he ate is Linklater's equivalent of Proust's madeleine.)

21 comments:

  1. Ubu Imperator10:47 PM

    Great review, Roy. I think you've touched on exactly the reason why I don't want to see this movie; i.e., it hits too close to adolescent modes of being that I recall vividly and have no desire to experience again, even vicariously.

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  2. Rand Careaga10:59 PM

    I went to see it shortly after its release on the strength of glowing early reviews, and for the first half--it's a long film--I was underwhelmed, but by the end the cumulative effect of the undertaking won me over, and I emerged from the theatre very moved indeed.

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  3. petesh11:33 PM

    Nice summary, but you might have stressed that the movie held your interest for nearly three hours. Mine too. It really did not seem long, it's just that the clocks bounded forwarded while I was in the theater. It has 100% support from the "top critics" at Rotten Tomatoes, and I agree. I hope there are Oscars for Arquette and Linklater (who could get three — screenplay, direction and producing) and I wouldn't mind if Hawke got one too, though I kind of doubt it. The logistics of making it are fascinating but shouldn't distract us from the end result: It's a great movie.

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  4. AGoodQuestion11:36 PM

    I have to admit that the only Linklater film I've seen so far has been his appropriately hallucinogenic take on "A Scanner, Darkly", which I enjoyed if that's the right word. I respect the idea behind this one, though, and expect to see it eventually.

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  5. Man, that is AWESOME! I especially liked Koya Jean and the dance move homage to Michael Jackson. I believe they are "the best Indian rockers in Malaysia. Great find, B4.

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  6. M. Krebs11:43 PM

    I found myself wishing that I could have seen the movie without knowing anything about it beforehand.

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  7. hellslittlestangel11:56 PM

    I assumed some reviews comparing it to The 400 Blows were just being hyperbolic, but it really is that good. Not only did the 3 hours fly by, but I hung around in the theater to watch the first hour over again.

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  8. ...the movie is more about change than about permanence.


    Nice review, Roy, and I agree with the pull quote. The movie for me was like watching the tide slowly come in on a wide sandy beach on a quiet summer day, inexorably creeping forward in no real hurry but progressing all the same and if you look away and then back again a minute later the beach is the same but different and then a whole bunch of minutes later the whole view is altered and wow, that's kind of cool but even cooler is that this too is changing and really the only thing that's certain is that it will always be changing as the tides do their thing and light offers an inexhaustible array of effects and the wind paints itself on the water and the currents exert their push and pull and a passing boat provides its wake.


    Boyhood was quiet and pleasant and reflective and elegant in its simplicity, and sitting back and letting a movie just wash over you can be a damn fine experience.

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  9. Chairman Pao12:04 AM

    Siddown, McKanRi, and let loose THA TIGER!

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  10. Roy, Keta, no need to thank me, Tengrain, the patron saint of small bloggers, got me hip to this unadulterated awesomeness.

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  11. I can't stop watching their videos... so awesome, so metal, and I'm not even a big metal fan!

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  12. smut clyde3:12 AM

    Mental note: Time to watch "Waking Life" again.

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  13. AlanInSF3:19 AM

    It does hit too close to those modes, but gives us the comfort of knowing it will pass, and the world will survive

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  14. coozledad9:03 AM

    Rob Halford and the Sepoy rebellion.

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  15. Chairman Pao9:57 AM

    I want to take the city with this comment. About 1 A.M. Loaded. Loaded.

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  16. cahuenga12:12 PM

    I appreciated the logistical nightmare and character study aspects of Boyhood, but... It seemed to me to be the telling of a relatively unremarkable upbringing of typical well-off kid. I mean, I saw this every day down in Orange County.

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  17. M. Krebs1:39 PM

    Oh, by the way, Linklater was on Marc Maron's podcast a few weeks ago. That conversation is well worth a listen. Maron had P.T. Anderson on the same week, and that was great, too.

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  18. John Wesley Hardin3:01 PM

    Hairbent for leather.

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  19. Formerly_Nom_De_Plume12:07 AM

    I don't know what I just saw, but it pleased me.

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  20. Oh. My. Glob.

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  21. Billy4:04 PM

    So, I actually watched Boyhood twice back-to-back and it was like two different movies. On the first viewing, I thought Arquette's mother character was so strong, doing the best she could to make a life for her children. And I laughed at the loser flophouse arrangement their father had with the stoner, band member roommate. I didn't take him seriously even when he later had the mustache and the kid. The second time I watched it, I realized how weak the mom was. She kept chasing something when her kids were right there. She brought people into their lives who, in the end, didn't matter. Whereas the father focused on them when he was with them. And the musician remained in their lives as something consistent.

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