Thoughts on.. Boyhood (2014)
Richard Linklater's new film, Boyhood (2014), continues his fascination with the passage of time as explored initially in Slacker (1991), and then in the trilogy of films Before Sunrise (1995) Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013). This time Linklater compacts 12 years of one boys life into one unique film.
Boyhood is comprised of all the moments in life we might not think of as dramatic, a narrative anathema to most films, yet together they form a dramatic and emotional whole. It's the little things which build over time that make a life a tale to tell, not just the grand dramas. There's a Charles Bukowski line from his poem, 'The Shoelace', which goes some way to evoking that idea of the little things, of lost time, although with a lot more tragedy:
it’s not the large things that
send a man to the
madhouse. death he’s ready for, or
murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…
no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the
madhouse…
not the death of his love
but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left …
it’s not the large things that
send a man to the
madhouse. death he’s ready for, or
murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…
no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the
madhouse…
not the death of his love
but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left …
This idea couples with accumulation and the passage of time is represented rather beautifully towards the close of the film where Mason (Ellar Coltrane) finds his mother (Patricia Arquette) in tears reflecting on how quickly time has passed and how much has changed. All of those little things accumulate and they form the backbone of life, a magical poetry that can bring you to tears, a kind of quiet Proustian agony.
Theres been discussion about the similarities with Michael Apted's Up documentary series, and Linklater himself has pointed to Truffaut's Antoine Doinel series, but this film stands alone in its originality in fully encompassing coming of age with the same actors over time.
The first time I saw the film I was reminded of Terence Malick's Tree of Life (2011) and felt there was kinship in that both films covered rites of passage, family and the passage of time in America.
In his review of Boyhood, film writer Michael Smith identifies the Malick connection, but notes Malick's film couched in "pretentious sequences involving digital dinosaurs and voice-over narration cloaked in cosmic-spiritual hokum" something from which Linklater's film entirely avoids.
The use of music in Boyhood is also intrinsic to its overall effect, much in the way Martin Scorsese selects music for effect Linklater does the same here, and the choice of Coldplay's song Yellow, to open the film recontextualised it and perfectly embodied that feeling of a time and place, tugging ever so slightly at the heart strings, I was reminded again of how fond I once was of that song and how fond I am of this film the masterpiece Linklater has been working towards from the beginning.
Malick's film is visually stunning, and is in keeping with the visual patterns explored in his other recent films, The New World (2005) and To The Wonder (2012), catching images of life and memory from defamiliarising angles, showing the world from perspectives we don't always see in cinema. What Malick in Tree of Life captured was 'sense' of life, an instinctual sense of existing, relying less on traditional narrative dialogue and more essentially primitive, child-like visual images of wonder, of touch, of smell, of sight, often verging on the pretentious, but equally building a story of American family life in the 20th Century.
