Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Boyhood (Movie Review by Bob Racine)



                                   2 hrs & 45 min, color, 2014

Who does this upstart Richard Linklater think he is?  The domestic drama he has given us just cannot be for real!  It is a floating freak, an offshoot of the most incredible and shameless realm of improbability.  How could they have let him spend twelve years making it?  All that time, and he has never caught on to how cinema is supposed to play in the second decade of the twentieth-first century A.D.  The chronicle of Mason (Ellar Coltrane), an American boy, from elementary school to college entrance just does not know how to follow the unwritten law.  This writer/director had the better part of three hours of running time, and nowhere in it does he make any room for the weird, the grotesque, or the scandalous. 

You would think the picture would at least have given us one money shot.  You all know what a money shot is, I presume, but in case anyone does not, I will try to envision it for you.  Steve Martin invented the term in one of his many movies (“Grand Canyon” maybe?).  That is where the school bus driver is assaulted on the bus with a military style rifle and his brains and blood are scattered all over the kid passengers.  We are completely deprived of teenage weir wolves or vampires.  The kid we see growing to adulthood is not even allowed to get a girl pregnant and complicate his and her life.  He has an older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), and the most of foolishness she is permitted to portray is getting a little drunk.  Where is that unwanted babe?  Where is that cuddly statistic?  And neither brother nor sister has to do battle with drug addiction, or even the beginning of drug addiction.  How up-startish can you get?

Nobody gets mugged in the film; nobody gets killed; there are no fistfights, no suicide attempts, not even on the part of his divorced single mother (Patricia Arquette) in spite of how harrowed she becomes dealing with not being appreciated while trying to make a living and a life for her children.  Did Linklater ever consider making the absentee father (Ethah Hawke) an ex-con, a drunkard or a narcotics dealer?  Does he have to be so loving and caring as he is, despite his record of bad choices and his awkwardness and sometime inappropriateness at self-expression?  I was just waiting (or was I?) for that apocalyptic fight between the parents that would have carved an additional hole in the Ozone Layer.  They have a few snappy moments and disagreements but the gloves never quite go on.  Yes, the mother gets remarried and discovers too late that the second husband is an alcoholic and abusive.  All right, now we are getting somewhere, right?  No?  She does not fold under the stress of having to break up a second household?   She bravely delivers her two children out from under the tyranny of their stepfather?  Really?  What a missed opportunity!  What is domestic drama coming to?   

“Life’s little moments!”  That is what Linklater calls the focus of his attention in this modest epic.  (Did I say epic?  Yes, I said epic!  If I said it, I must mean it.)  Believe it or not, he insists on writing about the people next door, about the private events that society at large never sees, about family outings and camping trips between father and son, about a mother going back to school and getting the degree she missed when unwelcome pregnancy pushed her into premature matrimony.  Mason is not some super genius or some jock or some master musician or some future hunk of a movie star.  He does acquire a skill at photography that earns him a scholarship, but he still has to face what one character so eloquently and poetically calls the “voluptuous panic” of choosing the road to his future.  Puny stuff by today’s standards – right?  Well, am I right?  Where is the high drama, the bizarre confrontation with danger on the highway after he gets his driver’s license, the broken bones, the night spent in a jail cell that deters him from a life of petty crime?  So much is missing.  So much the hungry maw of the movie-going public craves!  How could Linklater let us down like that? 

And if all this was not enough, he had the absolute effrontery to win Golden Globe Awards for Best Movie Drama and for Best Director, with the promise of a good bidding at the Oscars.  Honestly!  Gems like this (Did I say gems?  What is getting into me?) just do not win Academy Awards.  Or do they not?  On further inspection I guess I’ll have to eat these words.  (I am thinking “The Hurt Locker.”  Oh yes, that!) 
 
We have all heard of long shots in cinema creation.  A chance is taken on an unknown actor in a high profile film that turns out to be a lucky shot.  (Think Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate.”)  A little known production company goes after a screenplay that no major studio has the nerve to try to mount and strikes it rich at the box office.  (Think “David and Lisa.”)  Where would our treasury of motion picture classics be without brave starving artists going out on a limb, defying the studio system?  Long shots fire our imaginations and many times pay off.  But Linklater has virtually rewritten the meaning of the term.  Twelve years in production!  You cannot take a shot longer than that.  Unbelievable!  The same cast used throughout!  We watch Ellar and Lorelei literally grow up before our eyes.  Suppose one of these continuing players, young or older, had died? 

And we never see any seams.  A seamless tapestry of unsullied storytelling that somehow manages to keep us on our mental toes moment by moment!  Linklater counts on the little surprises to hold our attention, and grab our affections and summon our most tender emotions.  The heart gets hooked.  The little things move us.  Who in some quarters would have thought it?   I guess the reason they do hook us is that they are so close to home.  (Now who am I to know anything about that?  I am supposed to be poking friendly fun at this movie.  I should have known that I would end up giving away the secrets of my heart and mind instead.)   

All right, let me be direct.  I was struck most of all by how superbly we are put into the shoes of an adolescent.  Who would have thought that the ordinary struggles and frustrations of growing up would hold adult interest for three hours of running time?  And what a script!  Or was there a script?  I will bet that the kids themselves contributed to its formation.  Kid talk and parent/kid talk never sounded so accurate and on the mark and spontaneous.  We share with Mason the feeling that everybody is on your back, that nothing you do is quite enough, slow to realize that all this pressure comes from adults who love and respect you and see beneath your mumbling, slurry, self-conscious inability to express yourself.  How I wish, as a writer, I had thought of the movie’s closing line.  “Seize the day” is the old time-honored maxim, but these kids rework that idea, in fact reverse it: “It’s the day that seizes you.”  Or the moment, the hour, or whatever!  I am jealous!

Okay, I concede!  This nervy guy Linklater has done the miraculous.  I just wonder what subversions of the Zeitgeist he will be attempting next.  Whatever they are, all I can say to him is BRING THEM ON!  And good luck with the Oscars. 


To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

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