Boyhood

An incredibly ambitious film about the most simplistic of things: growing up. Twelve long years in the making, Boyhood contains many scenes of universal truth, and while it’s not perfect, it is something special.

Boyhood’s major problem is one of too many stories going on at once, a trimming of the fat would have tightened up some of the narrative flab. Namely a completely needless subplot involving a Mexican gardener who returns later on in the film to thank his white lady savior. It’s an awkward moment, and I’m not sure what it’s supposed to inspire in the audience aside from making me cringe.

But I found this to be Boyhood’s lone major stumbling block. What is so attractive about Boyhood is how it finds the meaningful and sublime moments in the mire of the everydayness. Growing up is something everyone does, and everyone does it a little differently, but there’s certain universal truths to be found here. First love, divorce, trying to form your own identity, gaining more observance of the outside world – we’ve all been there, and Boyhood documents these transitions.

The most poetic moments, and the ones I felt the most emotional attachment towards, were the ones involving the mother, played with honesty and soulful integrity by Patricia Arquette. Many of these quiet scenes between a single mother and her young son reminded me of my own childhood. Arquette is an actress I’ve never really warmed up towards much in the past, but here she absolutely knocked me flat on my feet. Her deep reservoirs of inner strength run dry in a scene late in the film in which she wonders what will come next for her now that her children are grown and on their own. She doesn’t get the splashy parental role like Ethan Hawke’s amiable slack father, but she is the film’s consistently beating heart, the sturdy rock around which her kids mature and develop.

Yes, Boyhood is a series of vignettes without a central narrative, and the closest the film comes to conventional narrative is when an alcoholic step-father is introduced. Besides this midsection, the film peaks in at random moments between 2002 to 2013. The other family members play more major roles in the earlier sequences, but as our boy grows up and gets more agency, they fall into the background. So in real life, so it goes in the cinema. It’s a strange experiment, and I suppose I could see why some would respond negatively towards it, but it touched me very deeply and I got a lot out of the experience.