Think back on your childhood. What do you remember? Do you remember meeting the first boy or girl you kissed? Or do you remember only the kiss? Do you remember breaking up?
As we age, our life doesn’t weave a narrative thread; rather, it becomes a patchwork of memories. These recollections make up a quilt that covers us at night as we lie in bed and think back on the years.
I remember my friends and I gawking at half-dressed women in a Sears catalog. I remember collecting Topps baseball cards, and how the gum inside the package tasted. I remember seeing “Star Wars” for the first time. I remember kissing Shawna, a gorgeous short-haired brunette, at horse camp the summer after eighth grade. And I remember the uncertainty of what I was going to do with my life as I approached high school graduation.
At 50, I remember a lot, including sitting in the theater after watching “Boyhood,” tears welling in my eyes. It seems like it was only yesterday.
It was yesterday, so my recall is good. “Boyhood” is a coming of age drama structured like our memories. Instead of offering a conventional storyline about a boy growing up, it consists of snippets of his life from first grade through high school. These bits and pieces are presented in linear a fashion, but don’t always spell everything out. For example, Mason’s mother meets a younger man. Later, she and her kids are living with him in his house. Eventually, she and her children are in the house alone. I guess she got the house in the divorce. When you’re watching “Boyhood,” you have to do some of the math.
The movie seems to have been born out of the human experience. Mason lives with his mom, sees his dad from time to time, has an older sister who’s a pain in the butt, moves from school to school as his mom moves from man to man, makes friends and loses them, and meets girls and loses them. Events take place around him: his mother marries, divorces, goes to college, earns her degree, and secures a teaching position - all on the fringes of the narrative because the story is told from Mason’s point of view, and these things don’t matter much to a young boy.
As a teen, Mason is lazy, disheveled, and socially awkward. He’s also unsure of himself, and the harder he tries to figure out who he is, the more everyone around him presses him with their ideas of who he should be. During a long stretch late in the film, nearly every word that comes out of an adult mouth is advice or admonition.
That might sound tedious, but there’s a lot of humor in the lectures. It’s also interesting to see how the grown-ups use words to try to manipulate Mason: “I have you in mind for a promotion to fry cook,” his boss at a restaurant says. “I believe in you! But do you believe in yourself? Now get out there and clean those tables!”
Mason is a good kid, though. He’s honest, kind, and philosophical. He shows an interest in photography. Maybe he’ll make something of it; maybe he won’t. There are rarely answers at that age, so “Boyhood” provides none.
The performances are miraculous; every note rings true. It’s as though writer and director Richard Linklater simply placed a camera among unsuspecting people and filmed their lives.
Linklater shot “Boyhood” a few weeks a year over the course of 12 years, using the same actors throughout the process. Watching Ellar Coltrane, who filmed his first scenes as Mason when he was seven, and his last when he was in his late teens, morph from a boy to a young man over the course of nearly three hours was like watching time lapse photography of a human being.
Simply stated, there has never been a movie like this one. In following Mason as he grows up, “Boyhood” shows the life of a young person to have great scope. Whereas Tolstoy penned his larger-than-life stories in ink across hundreds of pages, Linklater made his epic by training his camera on an average boy as he grew up. The breadth of this movie cannot be understated, yet its artistry is as unassuming as a children’s book.
So why the tears as I watched the credits? Looking back will pull something out of you. As I thought about Sears catalogs and baseball cards and my first kiss, pangs of nostalgia overwhelmed me. Then something from deeper within me rose to the surface: I’ve always regretted the decisions I made in my late teens, as they greatly affected the course of my life. But seeing those years portrayed on the screen made me realize I was simply finding my way, like Mason, and I forgave myself.
“Boyhood” might be just a film, but it’s a transformative one, both in terms of how it was made and the effect it can have on its viewers. After a summer of comic book blockbusters, and three decades of regret, it was just what I needed.
Four stars out of four. Rated R for language, sexual references, and teen drug and alcohol use.