Watch: Boyhood

Directed by Richard Linklater (IFC Films, 2014)

Nothing happens except the passage of time. A little boy, age 6, opens the film. He lies on his back, head resting in his crossed arms as he ponders the sky, the clouds, the smell of grass, or nothing at all. In Richard Linklater’s groundbreaking film Boyhood, the only thing we can be sure of is time will pass for everyone and little boys will eventually outgrow their littleness and, like all of us, become something more amorphous, less understandable, more adult.

Shooting over the course of 12 years, director Linklater created a unique opportunity to explore change in the form of the hard transition from child to teen to young man on the brink of adulthood. We first see main character Mason (Ellar Coltrane) when he is 6. He is a lovely child, all moppish hair and big eyes. His home life is small; one mother, one sister, one father who is sometimes there and sometimes not. The mother, played by Patricia Arquette, is full of sincere love even as she struggles with finances and relationships and single motherhood. The sister, played by Linklater’s daughter Lorelei, is full of the piss and vinegar of sibling rivalry. Ethan Hawke rounds out the family as the father, a man who is a confusing mix of warmth and wisdom, cool and distance.

Each actor committed to five or six days of filming at a time over a 12-year period, allowing the characters to age naturally on screen. The first jump in time brings us only slightly forward, though exactly when is difficult to know, as Linklater does not use much in the way of time signals. Here and there we get a reference to a popular song or to historical events like the war in Afghanistan or Obama’s first campaign. But otherwise the movement of time drifts forward without demarcation. We know the actors are older because the children’s faces grow less round, while the adults faces grow rounder or slightly more etched with the lines of maturity.

All the non-events of boyhood are represented. Mason watches his mom date and marry the wrong men with the helplessness of a child. He is immersed in new schools as his mom moves around the big state of Texas trying to find the right place for the little family to finally be whole. He skirts danger the way young boys do. Girls appeal to him. Sometimes they are nice. Sometimes they break his heart.

Even when one of the two alcoholic stepdads Mason lives through throws a glass of rum at him (he misses), the film does nothing to suggest a huge moment of significance. Instead, this is just another thing that happened.

It’s easy to view the series of vignettes as merely a cataloguing of a life without the sort of exposition and narrative we ask from dramatic film. And yet, the cumulative effect of the scenes as they advance through time are hugely affecting. Much like Michael Apted’s 7 Up series, watching the characters go through the banalities of life is both comforting and heartbreaking in its familiarity.

In the unassuming scene composition and minimal dialogue, Linklater gives the viewer the gift of open interpretation. It is not a narrative film exactly, but nor could it be called reality. In most films the actors, writers, and filmmaker do the work of shaping a story for us so that life appears tidy and meaningful, with defined moments of purpose or ennui. But this isn’t how life really works. The movement through time without commentary, executed by a believable cast of characters we sometimes hope we are nothing like and other times hope what we find familiar, is not too much of a reach. It is the beauty of the film.

No film has ever tried to do what Linklater does here. It’s a risk of commitment, timing, and effort that has a huge payoff. Boyhood serves as a companion piece for Apted’s series—each as longitudinal studies that tell us so much about who we are. In both, we recognize ourselves. We remember what we’ve always known, that it is not in the shaping and understanding of life events where we live. Instead, it’s the undefined moments, the stringing together of grace, that makes life rich and good—maybe even more so for the mystery of it.