Reliving My Boy's "Boyhood"

Boyhood follows the life of a boy, Mason, and it was filmed over 12 years as he grew from youngster until he left for college. Sounds like a documentary, but it’s not. Boyhood presents a fictional boy from a fictional dysfunctional family, but the actors were all filmed over a 12-year period. It makes for a unique movie experience.

This movie isn’t driven by a neat story arc—the plot is more like life itself, meandering through events and phases. But you still want to see what happens next. The fact that I can say that when the movie is almost three hours long tells me that the director, Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise, Before Midnight), has definitely gotten something right here.

As my son is just a year or two younger than the boy in the movie, it was fascinating to revisit so much of the culture we’ve moved through. I brought Andrew to a midnight release party for the seventh Harry Potter book, just as in the movie. Ethan Hawke’s character is reading Into Thin Air right about the time I did. He has run through his own string of video games in much the same order as Mason. We even had the same 20 Questions gadget.

It’s a gutsy move for a director, counting on the fact that none of his actors will drop out or be forced to drop out of the filming over that long of a time period. He had to gamble on the kids who would grow up in the film, hoping they would turn out to be good actors. In particular the boy in question needed to turn out to be a good actor. It worked out for him; Ellar Coltrane delivers a great performance as a young man struggling to see what future he should be chasing.

But the director is not the only one taking risks. It seems to me a pretty gutsy move for actors too. Especially for Patricia Arquette, who plays his mother. It’s not likely to be flattering to see yourself age, for real, in a movie that you started in as a young adult (though I would argue she was not young enough for this role) and ended squarely in middle age. Especially when your character has very questionable taste in fashion. Somewhere in the middle viewers see her as she appeared in the TV show “Medium,” if you remember such things. Arquette takes on this challenge, playing an intelligent, caring mother who has some serious flaws and makes a few terrible life choices.

Ethan Hawke, who plays Mason’s dad, ages too, but let’s be real, it’s never as flattering for the woman. Plus you get the feeling they make him look dorkier as he ages on purpose—I think he hasn’t really changed all that much.

This movie gives you a sense of how much happens in twelve years, and also how quickly it goes by for the adults. As Arquette’s character says toward the end, “I thought there was going to be more!” That’s a sentiment any of us of a certain age have experienced at one time or another.

While the parents are busy getting on with their lives and trying to make something more for themselves, sometimes the children are just collateral damage along the way. At moments you (or at least I) want to shake the parents into thinking about what they are doing. And the advice they hand out to their kids is for the most part a fistful of nothing. At one point he admits that when Mason and his sister were babies, he had no concern for the state of their souls. It seems that this is true of most of the adults in their lives. If nothing else, the movie might make you feel better about your own parenting!

So, mothers of teen boys who will soon be testing their wings, beware, this may hit too close to home. But it’s a fascinating look at the fleeting nature of youth, of life in general. At the end you may be whisked right back to being 18 or 19, when the whole world awaited.