The most reliable measure of Birmingham’s status as a creative city might well be the Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival. Sure, we have a university and an uptown entertainment center, but our annual exhibition of films and videos from around the world metaphorically raises our gaze from the navel to the screen. For a weekend, we are not the obsessive-compulsive civil rights history city or the narcoleptic service economy site between Atlanta and New Orleans. Sidewalk introduces Birmingham to the world as a place to get lost in imagination.
To prepare for Sidewalk this year, I did something I haven’t done lately. I went to see a movie at a theatre. Nothing against the multibillion dollar industry that attempts to entice me weekly into its venues, but there hasn’t been much on the marquees recently that struck me as particularly enticing. Crime-fighting turtles and galaxy-guarding raccoons notwithstanding, not even the Hollywood-ization of James Brown’s saga made me want to Get On Up.
What brought me back to the plex was the chance to see a Richard Linklater film on the big screen. He’s one of the nation’s most accomplished directors, but he doesn’t generally make movies that sell a lot of popcorn for Carmike and Regal. School of Rock, yes, and his remake of Bad News Bears, but the bulk of his 17 features to date have not been what you would call box-office draws.
The movie I went to see last weekend is called Boyhood. It’s almost three hours long, and it’s so good I’m not sure I can tell you why.
Ordinarily, I’m drawn to movies that tell stories. Boyhood is more a collection of vignettes than an actual story. What usually catches my fancy is a director’s grasp of narrative. In Boyhood, you could say that the director is in the grasp of this narrative, because there was no actual storyline when Linklater commenced filming in 2002. As for the plot, well, it is this: a kid grows up.
Boyhood is about a boy named Mason, played by Ellar Coltrane. To be precise, he’s Mason Evans, Jr., son of Mason Evans, Sr. (Ethan Hawke) and Olivia (Patricia Arquette). His sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, daughter of the filmmaker) completes this nuclear family. The film presents scenes from Mason Jr.’s life between first grade and college, and no one scene is especially long.
Part of what makes Boyhood affecting is the way it was made. Linklater has made time a collaborator in several of his previous projects. Slacker, his first generally-released movie, depicted 24 hours in the life of layabouts in 1991 Austin, Texas. In what is called “the Before trilogy,” Linklater told the stories of Jessy and Celine (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) as they fell in and out of love throughout three different movies (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight), filmed between 1995 and 2013. The plan for Boyhood was even more audacious.
Around the turn of the century, Linklater had the idea to do a series of short films about a child growing up. In the realm of documentaries, British director Michael Apted had created the so-called “Up” series, filming the same group of schoolchildren at seven-year intervals, so far creating eight episodes between 1964 and 2012. France’s Francois Truffaut made five films between 1959 and 1979 about a character named Antoine Doinel (played in all five by Jean-Pierre Leaud), and there are myriad TV shows in which actors have played the same character for long periods of time.
Linklater wanted to use the same actors in sequential episodes covering 12 years in a boy’s life, but at some point he amended this concept to make it just one big film. (Interestingly, no one could sign a contract for the project, since the law doesn’t cover contracts lasting longer than seven years.) The plan was to get the actors together every summer to shoot, and between 2002 and 2013, the cast put in a total of 39 days shooting Boyhood.
What he brought to the screen suggests that Linklater could be America’s Ingmar Bergman. As the Swedish director strove to depict the psychological depths of human relationships, the Texan offers the raw truth of the prosaic. Mason and Samantha live in a broken home, raised mostly by their mother and sporadically visited by their father. Here, nothing much happens, by which I mean everything happens. Ordinary conversation around the supper table is limned with heartbreak. Money imposes its inexorable will upon expectations. The children grow physically, but spiritual growth is more difficult to discern. Love in many manifestations appears and hides again, like the moon behind a cloudbank.
One looking for the mechanism of the movie may be pleasantly surprised. Despite the 12-year span of its production, there are no glaring continuity seams in lighting, sound or cinematography. Similarly, the director was able to maintain the focus of his actors despite the long intervals between shooting scenes and the biological changes they underwent during those intervals. The passage of time is underlined by certain pop songs and video games, but it is most clearly denoted by the way these actors appear on the screen year after year.
The two kids are rightly praised for the lack of affect in their acting, but something should be said as well about Patricia Arquette’s fearless take on Olivia. The film could as well have been titled Single Momhood, so specifically, yet subtly, does she draw a viewer’s attention to the harrowing emotional straits in which a divorced woman with children so often finds herself.
Boyhood is about what Bob Dylan once called “life and life only.” It is as simple as a home video, as complex as a Dostoyevsky novel, and it reveals just as much about life as you want a movie to. See it for yourself and find out what will be revealed to you.
