I guess we can stop making coming-of-age movies now because good Texas boy Richard Linklater has just put out the greatest one ever made. Every time a new film about adolescence comes out, Linklater can say “That’s cute, but did they film their entire cast naturally growing and changing over the course of twelve years like I did?”
The story behind the making of Boyhood is remarkable, but the film stands out most because it dares to take a boy’s life and render it as an EPIC. We meet main character Mason at age 6, which is about the age that kids start to make coherent memories, and follow him on up to college. The story is lengthy. It sprawls. Literature is comfortable with that sort of thing, but films aren’t unless its a sensational story set against a visually compelling, turbulent setting (I’m talking Lawrence of Arabia sorta stuff). Linklater breaks all of the rules here by making his epic so modest that it doesn’t even really have a plot. It’s a series of moments—brutal, strange, sad, funny, awkward moments—that add up to not only tell the story of a fractured family, but to tell the story of the large and small experiences that form a person. It’s the next step for a director who’s previously devoted entire films to merely two people walking around a city and having a conversation.
The secret ingredient though of why this is so moving is that, in addition to being about childhood, this is also a parent’s film. Linklater casts his own daughter in a major part here as Mason’s sister (and she’s wonderful). Linklater was raising a child at the same time that he was making a movie about one. The resulting work reflects a sensitive father’s angst about doing the job right and realizing that there are some things that you can’t control.
It sustains its beauty right up to the end. Mason, now a scruffy college kid, spends much of his time babbling pedestrian conspiracy theories and trite life insights like he’s the first person who ever thought of them (most of us are like that in our teens and early 20s; I certainly was; it’s a necessary phase). On a fluke trip to Texas’s magnificent Big Bend National Park, a place of ancient desert terrain and ageless rock formations, Mason stumbles upon a wise and expansive thought. It’s not The Meaning of Life, but it’s as close as he’s ever gotten. It’s something that will stay with him and it’s the end of his boyhood. It’s also the end of the film.
Different people will take away different things here. They’ll seize on different moments. Me, I remember my own (single) mother crying to herself, painfully, not happily, on the day when I left home for college, as Patricia Arquette does here. I didn’t understand it and, like Mason here, I quickly forgot it because I was so excited about leaving home. I would never even THINK about that moment again until I saw this film. And now I think I understand it.
Boyhood is about learning. So is adulthood. I learned a few things here.