Boyhood

Boyhood tells the story of a young boy growing up from the age of six to nineteen. There is nothing novel about that. The method is where the novelty lies, wherein Richard Linklater essentially tells the story in real time, filming for a few days a year in order to show the characters literally growing. This film tells the story of life itself and, while the story itself isn't particularly interesting (how could it be?), it is in the documentation that the brilliance of this film lies.

Boyhood serves as an index of the events of each year that it documents, while never overtly mentioning the year: each year is made indexed through the use of the music of the time and the events of the time, but also the visual aesthetics of the time. The scenes that begin the film actually look like they were shot in the early 2000s; the advancement of camera technology can be seen throughout the film. Similarly, the fact that these scenes were shot at the same time as the events they were portraying meant that there was advanced knowledge and all the events played out without any bias. For example, when Ethan Hawke tells his kids that they should vote for anyone but Bush, the scene contains a real liberal optimism of the time, which honestly had people believing that Bush had screwed up enough to lose the election. We know now that that did not happen, but how was Ethan Hawke to know that? It seemed like an inevitability.

Speaking of Ethan Hawke, this film also works as an index of the actors in the film as they go through life. When the film begins, Hawke is happily married to Uma Thurman and is just beginning to live down that awful version of Hamlet, while Patricia Arquette had just divorced Nicolas Cage and was doing some crap! You slowly see them as their careers move along. You can point out when real-world events happened to these people by figuring out where in their lives they are. Even more interesting, this film is also Linklater's documentation of his daughter reaching adulthood. It's easy to just say the number twelve, but that encompasses a long period of time. If we accept the birth of cinema as 1894, this film took ten percent of cinema's entire history to shoot!

Of course, it needs to be pointed out that, going in, I was wary of this fil, because this is not in and of itself a novel idea. Filmmakers have captured a variety of moments of one person's life in the past, whether it's the "every seven years" approach of Michael Apted's Up Series, the transition from childhood to middle age of Francois Truffaut's Antoine Doinel saga or the similar story of children growing while their father is in prison, told by Michael Winterbottom in Everyday. I am in no way trying to argue that Boyhood is superior to any of these films, but this film does contain one element that the rest don't: this story is not told in a vacuum. Apted and Truffaut's films are all about the people with the world around them being mere window dressing, while Winterbottom, avoiding this, simply keeps his characters isolated. While the children grow, the outside world is kept out, keeping the children and their parents in a sterilized environment consisting of home and jail. Boyhood is not in any way in a vacuum as has been clearly argued here. The outside world is just as important to the boy as the boy is to his environment; there is a perfect mixture of nature and nurture involved, that is necessary in order to make sense of the story.

Boyhood is not a perfect film. In fact, there are a lot of loose threads and happy coincidences that keep it from reaching perfection as a narrative product. However, as a document of humanity, it is a necessary text. Leaving the theatre, all I could think was "what if The Tree of Life was filmed like this? What if Malick does something like this next?" It's not like his releases come out any faster than Boyhood!