Boyhood (2014)

directed by Richard Linklater

Tyler Peterson

I can remember being ten years old, but with my chubby cheeks, round glasses, and a bushy helmet of bowl-cut hair, looking much younger. It was my first day at my new school. The fifth-grade classroom was arranged in a pattern of desk clusters, four to a cluster—my own cluster being the exception, as my desk was awkwardly grafted on to an existing four-desk cluster. If you saw it in a movie you’d call it a ham-fisted visual metaphor.

As part of a get-to-know-each-other first-day activity, we went around the room and answered questions about ourselves, including whether we were a “sandbox kid,” a term I wasn’t familiar with. It turned out to mean someone who’d attended this school district “from the sandbox,” i.e. from kindergarten on. The four kids seated in my cluster, all sandbox kids, took the opportunity to chatter to one another about some monkeyshines one of them pulled in first grade, while I sat in squirming silence.

It was a scene I later saw reflected in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, in which Mason, having transferred schools on extremely short notice to escape an abusive stepfather, sheepishly dips into a new classroom while the students recite the Pledge of Allegiance. The way the scene is shot, and Ellar Coltrane’s performance, impresses the viewer with Mason’s awkwardness and trepidation, but what’s interesting is that the actual narrative content of the scene is rather neutral, even perhaps more positive than Mason could have hoped for. The teacher greets him warmly, and a boy next to him gives him a fist bump and says “Welcome to the suck.” Watching that scene put my own experience in perspective. I watch that and I think, hey, maybe it really wasn’t as bad as it seemed.

That dichotomy, that tension between the distorted memory of an event and its banal reality, is central to the experience of Boyhood, a passion project from writer/director Richard Linklater, who filmed it over the course of twelve years. The movie follows Mason from ages six to eighteen, with Ellar Coltrane aging in real time along with the rest of the cast, including his mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette), father Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), and older sister Samantha (Lorelai Linklater). It looks at childhood scientifically, from the detached perspective of an adult, taking little slices, little biopsies, one moment after the next, laying them out on a slide for examination. Some look much better than they did at the time. Some much worse.

Most kids who move as much as I did have the military to thank. My family owed its moves to the cruel whimsies of science. I was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, while my father was finishing up his doctorate in soil science at the University of Nebraska. At age three, we moved to a Minneapolis suburb so my dad could do postgrad work. Age five, Kearney, Nebraska, to teach. Age eight, back to Lincoln, this time so Dad could teach at his alma mater. (My mom, being a nurse, could find work in pretty much any city, and with some grumbling, did.)

I remember very clearly the big sit-down discussion in our living room where it was announced that we were moving yet again, this time to Iowa, so my dad could take a job at a seed conglomerate. It was a bright and summery day, the sun was streaming in through the windows, yet the temperature seemed to dip ten degrees when I heard the news. I was furious. Why do we have to move again? I asked. Why was it so hard to just find a place and stay there?

My parents didn’t know what to do. The previous moves hadn’t affected me the way that last one had.  We’d moved to Kearney when I was barely out of my toddler years—at that age you’ll play with pretty much anyone your size. But in Kearney, and later in Lincoln, I had made real friends. Sometimes one of their names and faces will drift through my mind like a balloon I thought had blown away. Tyler: he was my first “best friend” in Kearney. We’d bonded over being named Tyler. My new best friend, my Lincoln best friend, was Lauren. She lived a couple of doors down from me and opened her yard’s gate for me one day so I wouldn’t climb her fence trying to get to her mulberry tree.

I was never what you’d call a social butterfly. What friends I had I’d won through luck and perseverance. I’d left Tyler, as I left many others, and I soon would leave Lauren, and others. This time, though, I knew what would ensue: you would promise to call. You would promise to write. You said you were going to visit. And you did write, for a while. The easiest way for this to go is for the emails to just abruptly stop. The hardest way is for the emails to start becoming irregular, and soon you get your first one in eight months, and your friend has a weird new hairstyle and is talking about basketball a lot, and they never used to mention liking basketball, and in your reply you try to say, “Hey cool! Basketball!” but you get too sad to continue.

All of that barreled through my head like a big black train when I heard those words in that bright living room. I felt the same dark whoosh during one of Boyhood’s first scenes, which finds Olivia sitting with Samantha and Mason in a sunny dining room, patiently explaining her plans to move to Houston to attend college and make a better life for them. The scene was familiar in a way that made my lips purse, a small eeep escaping, despite myself. The kids’ exasperation, the feeling of betrayal, the casual petulance, Samantha’s flat denial—I felt that. Also highly relatable are the passive-aggressive, casually cruel snipes the kids get in on the car ride up there.  “Goodbye, house,” Samantha says. “I'll never like Mommy as much for making us move!”

And then…the kids just move on. A couple scenes later and they’re all better. We don’t get a series of scenes showing how the kids acclimated to their new home, how they let go of their bitterness. It’s easy to say, “Well, of course, Linklater’s got twelve years to cover, he’s got to keep things moving at a decent clip.” But Boyhood never feels rushed or fragmented. You never get the sense that there’s some huge thing missing that you have to figure out contextually. Rather, you’re made to conclude that life just…happened.

It’s like that, you know. You swear you’re going to be mad at your folks forever, that you’re never going to forgive them, and then you’re just going about your business one day and you realize you haven’t thought about how angry you were in God knows how long. That’s just what you do.

Kids are resilient. More resilient than adults are aware, and much more resilient than kids themselves can appreciate. You don’t know your grit as a kid because you’re so wrapped up in your own drama. Your emotions are fresh and hit raw. You surrender to your moods like they’re a giant snatching you off the ground and carrying you helplessly along. Everything is a huge deal, an epic tragedy. And you like it, too: it’s kind of enthralling how powerful your own sadness and anger are. You only ever get over anything by accident.

Boyhood knows this and it doesn’t try to trivialize it, merely to contextualize. Earlier I likened Boyhood to a science experiment. The moral logic of Boyhood, however, isn’t guided by some clinical sense of objectivity, but rather the warm human touch of wisdom and perspective. As Mason’s dad notes, simply being alive as a kid is fantastic, because as an adult, “you don’t feel as much. Your skin gets tougher.” This is why, when we look back on our own childhood, our first impulse is to romanticize, to marvel at how wide open we used to be to the ebbs and currents of our souls. But to a child, the ability to recognize that this thing I’m feeling is transitory—that no mood, good or bad, lasts forever—is equally marvelous. You can’t teach that. You can only grow into it.

Richard Linklater’s preoccupation with the transitory comes through in his work a lot. His breakthrough film, Slacker, had no protagonists and no plot—simply a camera drifting through Austin, Texas, floating from one context-free conversation to another. His cult classic Dazed and Confused is a similarly freeform look at a bunch of high school students on the cusp of graduation, weaving in and out of one another’s lives. Before Sunrise and its sequels Before Sunset and Before Midnight are all about long, meandering conversations born of chance encounters.

Many of Linklater’s movies don’t have a plot to speak of. Boyhood certainly doesn’t. There’s no single framework that encompasses all the movie’s events. Real life, after all, doesn’t follow a three-act plot structure. A childhood doesn’t have a discrete central conflict, themes, plot devices, rising and falling action, catharsis, any of those English 101 words; it’s literally just a bunch of stuff that happens.

This loose, almost improvisatory structure means Linklater is able to populate Boyhood with colorful characters who have no real plot function. People drop in and out of Boyhood in the same manner that people drop in and out of our lives. Mason’s parents both have significant others whom we don’t know are gone until others show up. Mason has a blond friend with whom he drives home from graduation and who seems to be on a first-name basis with half the people at Mason’s graduation party, yet we never know his name. In at least two instances, a bit character from early in the film pops up unexpectedly later, including the last scene, where a girl from Mason’s middle school goes hiking with him and watches the sunset.

This willingness to play with our expectations extends to story elements. Boyhood is littered with classic trope setups that don’t pay off, significant-looking shots that don’t meet their expected transitions, Chekhov’s guns that refuse to fire. A preteen Mason is hounded in a bathroom by some bullies in the kind of scene that usually serves to set up an antagonist, but here is simply a one-off confrontation. A teenaged Mason and his friends drink beer and screw around with circular saw blades, and it’s the kind of scene that usually ends in someone losing a finger, but no one gets injured—as, we are forced to admit, happens more often than not. Sam comes home from college mysteriously wan and nauseous in a way that’s Hollywood code for “pregnant!”—Mason even jokes to that effect—but no, she’s hungover.

 Even more remarkable, though, are the scenes that aren’t there: we don’t see Olivia’s or Mason Sr.’s second weddings, we don’t see any breakups, we don’t see Mason graduate. All these big transformative events that mainstream movie plotting revolves around, all happen offscreen. Mason’s self isn’t defined by small moments of high drama, but rather the much larger world of the mundane and the routine.

The insouciance with which Linklater treats his story elements mimics that of the hand of fate. Perhaps part of the reason our personal crises seem so devastating is that we’re used to thinking of our own lives in Hollywood terms. We write screenplays in our heads and fill out the “supporting cast” with people who reflect ourselves in some way. I think the reason I struggled so hard with moving away from my friends is that in the stories that informed my life—the books I read, the movies I watched—there was no real precedent for friends peacefully growing apart. Their presence in my life defined it, a baseline I could count on being there, whatever else happened.

There’s nothing like that in Boyhood, no baseline, no status quo to return to. In denying you that certitude, Boyhood becomes an almost Buddhist meditation on the essential randomness and impermanence of all things. I got over being mad at my parents for moving so much years and years ago, but not until around the time I saw Boyhood did I really forgive them. I realized that I was better off for having had those friends in my life, even if we’d lost touch. Finding value in the temporary is an essential skill to learn in a world such as ours. Growing up means realizing that the people in our lives aren’t here to impart life lessons, or catalyze a change in us, or define our struggle for personhood. They’re just there. And they’d better be enough for us, because they’re all we get.

Tyler Peterson is a writer, critic, and musician. He has movie writing featured in Film Daily, Grumpire, and The Agony Booth. He lives in Des Moines, Iowa with his family and feeds stray cats.