Boyhood (2014) Review

I have a soft spot in my heart for coming of age movies, even though I feel the genre is quite dependant on the interpretation of life events, at a young age, by the writer/director more than any other. I mean you can say a lot of action movies are the same, but there’s a lot of variation you can have in terms of what shlock you can throw together in those films. A lot of coming of age movies tackle the same sorts of life events faced by kids and young people, and unless the guys behind the camera have a really neat take on it, or at least a unique way of depicting it, then it just doesn’t work. Because if you make a movie about an action hero, nobody is going to be putting themself in his place when he’s kicking ass, because most people aren’t actually action heroes, but literally everyone was a child, teenager and young adult at some point, going through similar things at similar stages in life.

Boyhood tries to capture that relatability in a bottle. It’s less a movie and more a tour through “oh yeah, I remember when this happened to me as a kid” sort of deal. The way the film was shot, using the same cast over the course of 12 years plays into this: There really isn’t a great overarching plot or any one specific part of growing up Boyhood wants to focus on. It picks a couple of profound things and gives them half-an-hour a piece or so, and sprinkles in some other smaller milestones of growing up as it sees fit. Kids connecting with their divorced parents, abusive father figures, first relationship, moving out etc. Because Boyhood is so broad it means anyone can relate to it: Maybe you didn’t have divorced parents, but maybe you did know someone abusive, or maybe you didn’t have a girlfriend while in high school but you did move out for college/university and meet someone there. Even in it’s smaller moments it’s sort of impossible not to see something you might have gone through as a kid, whether it’s picking on your sibling and then blaming them for it when the parent comes in, or maybe it’s getting mad your parents forgot about a promise they made you nearly ten years ago and which only you remembered.

As far as Boyhood is strung together, it is good. There is no obnoxious “one year later” text, or whatever, to signify the passage of time, you just see it on the characters faces. They’re older, their hair is different, they’re taller, the adults have more wrinkles than last you saw them. Stuff like that. What I like most is the passage of people fading in and out of life, acknowledging which people stick with us and which are temporary: In this film there are two drunken father figures, and one is divorced and shoed out of the movie entirely offscreen because the kids in this movie don’t see all that messy divorce stuff, it’s just something the mother quietly carries around while raising her family. There’s something oddly rewarding about watching a scene near the end, where our boy Mason is having a graduation party at home, and you can take note of the characters there who have always been there since the start of the film, those who are no longer present, and those who are new but who probably won’t stick around for the next phase of his life.

I think it’s safe to say I like Boyhood. It resonates with me a lot, but I do often find that it’s broadness, which does attribute to many of the things I like about it, isn’t entirely a good thing. Anything profound Boyhood might have to say is inferred from the characters age, where they are and when they are, but you get the sense that the film is also trying to be a little more profound than that, maybe pretentiously so towards the end. As Mason grows up, developing his own personality as a young adult, it’s harder to keep with the broadness as the need for him to realistically become a more specific character grows and grows. So the film has a choice to make: Make Mason the most cliché teenager ever to keep the main strength of the film going, or better define him as a character maybe at the cost of what has made the first half of the film so good. The film decides to make him the most cliché movie teenager ever, which I think is the best of two bad choices. On one hand it allows the film to keep playing to its main strength, but on the other hand the film ends with you having spent a long few hours watching this character grow up and leaves you with the bizarre sensation that you truly don’t know anything about him, on account of how generic a teen he was written to be. And that is the biggest fault that I think Boyhood has.

Though I prefer the scenes where the kids are younger, I do think the ending is pretty good. Mason is at university meeting people he has never met before. There is a quiet moment where he’s awkwardly talking to this girl and there is this typical barrier to opening up you get when you meet someone new like that. You think of all the stuff you’ve seen in Mason’s life and how this girl, assuming the guy doesn’t go on to marry her, probably won’t hear even a quarter of it even if they’re good friends, and the same if probably true for what Mason will come to know of her. The impression this movie left me with is that all of us humans look about as shallow as a puddle to one and other for the most part, and that acknowledging there is an ocean of a human being beyond that superficial exterior is a pretty important thing.

Would I recommend Boyhood? I would, yes. At times it doesn’t feel like a movie, it just straight up feels like you dug up some family’s time capsule and shoved it into your old VHS player, but it is good for that and I think that’s part of the appeal. But if you’re looking for something more character driven and dramatic than a scrapbook of a strangers life, you might be better off looking elsewhere.