Boyhood
My parents divorced when I was two. Afterwards, my brother and I lived with my mom, visiting our dad every other weekend. When I was six, we moved into a small cabin in a Big Sur Canyon, where my mom’s boyfriend lived. We stayed there for about a year, until my mom couldn’t stand his mood swings and drinking and the fact that he spanked me and my brother. We never lived with him again, though they were on again and off again for the next few years. Eventually, we settled in the house that I think of as “where I grew up,” and she married my stepdad.
As a younger man I harbored dreams of becoming a writer, which, to me, meant writing novels. But though I’ve worked my way into being a decent essayist, I’ve found that fiction is beyond me—as with my photographs, my strength is in observation, not construction. I know now that the only story I could ever really tell is my own, and writers who write only about themselves have long struck me as tiresome navel-gazers.
But then there is Richard Linklater, and Boyhood.
I’m sure that by now you all know about this movie. The thing that everyone is talking about is the remarkable length of the production, Linklater having brought the same cast together every year for twelve years in order to allow us to watch them grow and age. To be sure, that’s an impressive logistical feat, and it allows for a level of verisimilitude that I’ve never seen before in a movie. But what makes Boyhood the breathtaking experience that it is isn’t the fact that it took so long to make. No, the special thing about this film is how it presents a life in a way that is undramatic, yet intimate and resonant. Watching it, I felt like I could have been watching my own childhood. It makes sense, considering that Linklater drew from his own youth in writing Boyhood.
It’s more than just a portrait of a young man, though. Because in it I also recognized pieces of myself as a parent, and pieces of my own parents. One of the things that is so strange about growing up and having kids of your own is the way it makes you re-evaluate your memories of the people who raised you, to see them as people who were muddling through as best they could, the same way you are now. I watched this movie and couldn’t help but wonder what it must have been like for my mom to have two young sons on her own, or what it must have been like for my dad to only get to see us for two days out of fourteen.
I wondered, in one of my recent movie reviews, whether there were any interesting stories left to tell about men. Boyhood showed me that a story well-written, a story with emotional weight, told with insight and quiet confidence, can make a familiar story fresh and vital. I’m so glad I got the chance to see it.
Viewed: 2015-02-06 | Released: 2014-08-15 | Score: A