Boyhood

Boyhood feels less like a film than like an experience. The 12-year document of a little boy growing up feels unstructured. There are almost no dramatic climaxes. Indeed many key scenes (the mother’s two divorces, the father’s second marriage) happen off-camera. Leaps to another time period are marked by hero Mason’s advance in age. Perhaps one speech captures this point: We don’t seize the moment, Mason tells his new girlfriend, the moment seizes us. We live in the grip of the now. 

The title is dramatized by the first two shots: a clouded blue sky, then a close up of six-year-old Mason’s face.The sky is the universe and it’s both clear and clouded, the boy an individual life, ditto. The large sky and small boy are antithetical. Conversely, the wide open sky is an emblem of the vast potential of the boy's future. 
      The film uses one boyhood to evoke Everyboy’s growing through the tribulations of life. Young Mason faces a range of options to determine what kind of a man he will be. The two stepfathers want to remake him into a more conventional macho image. The first cuts his hair off, the second tries to remake his manner. Both are as brutish as the older boys’ swagger in the indoor camping scene.

The adults pass through parallel self-realizations. The father (Ethan Hawke) starts out as an irresponsible man child who grows into an effective father and eventually into a second family, where he achieves the maturity he tried to avoid. He goes from cool GTO to suburban van. But when he offers to help pay for Mason’s grad party he still has an empty wallet. When his loser friend Jim ends up with a very good rock band, he too achieves his kind of fulfilment even if it falls short of his desired stardom. 

Mason’s mother has the most dramatic growth. The single parent mother of two goes back to school, does a Master’s in Psychology and ends up a Psych prof with both kids in college. She careens through two other marriages in which apparently mature men turn into abusive alcoholics. She survives the most dramatic adversity. In an ominous cycle, her second marriage is to her professor, the third to her student, a mature veteran. The Psych prof proves a nut case. The second in the monotony of civilian life forgets the lesson that served him well in Iraq: to respect the people he deals with. Both men redefine themselves as forms of Corrections Officer. 

When Mason goes off to college, despite her pride and love his mother feels dashed. “I thought here'd be more.” In life as in movies we’re raised to expect high drama, great achievements, some huge experience. Mason picks up this point when he discusses being jilted with his dad. “What’s the point?”  There is no point, he replies, it’s just life, one moment after the next. There this film mirrors as it follows life, a sequence of small joys, challenges, and the beauties and stimulations of the moment. Nothing is big but the small resonates.

Of course the film is much more structured than it seems. A few lines are repeated across the decades, e.g.,”Who are you going to be?” Some of the song lyrics hit metaphoric points: e.g., “Arrivals and Departures are side by side;” “The day I was born I began to die.” The music embodies the passage of time. Like the film’s re-creation of the past, Mason’s dad makes him a CD of post-breakup Beatles singles as a facsimile of the band’s reunion. 

Director Linklater also notes the changing social background. The new tech unfurls, from the kid’s video games through the cell phone to the computerized selection of college roommates. The political background is limned in the soldier’s return from Iraq and Obama’s election campaign against McCain. Mason’s Dad’s second wife comes from a Republican, Christian rifle-toting farm family, antithetic to his nature.

There are also thematically focused scenes. When Mason visits his mother’s lecture she’s discussing the history of John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory,  which was in the air when that section was being shot. Bowlby contended that evolution required that primates develop secure bonds with their first caregivers to sustain them through life. That refocuses Mason’s, his mother’s and his sister Samantha’s plot-lines. If the idea wasn’t in Linklater’s mind when he started filming it certainly emerged as his actors, characters and narrative developed.  
     The last shot suggests a happy ending but without the clear closure we expect of a conventional film. As soon as they meet, Mason, his new roommate, his girlfriend and her roommate go hiking to catch a spectacular sunset. Mason and the other roommate are obviously attracted to each other, as they chat comfortably and avoid catching each other’s glances. The film ends on them together, in a close-up, with the sky between them. The sky and closeup replay the opening but now the solitary kid is a man with a beautiful woman. They’re not touching but they're connected. Their attachment is another small moment in the flow of small moments we’ve witnessed.  We know what we want to happen between them but we don’t know that it will. But that’s the point. All we have is the moment. That’s how life goes — and movies usually don’t.