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(MONDAY 23 MAY 2022 • 8:15pm • Prince Charles Cinema • 7 Leicester Pl, London WC2H 7BY, United Kingdom)
https://princecharlescinema.com/PrinceCharlesCinema.dll/WhatsOn?f=16659095
"Boyhood" (2014)
Filmed over 12 years with the same cast, "Boyhood" is a story of growing up as seen through the eyes of a child named Mason (Ellar Coltrane), who literally grows up on screen before our eyes. Single Mom Olivia (Patricia Arquette) and Dad Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) charts the rocky terrain of childhood. Snapshots of adolescence from road trips and family dinners to birthdays and graduations and all the moments in between become transcendent, set to a soundtrack spanning the years from Coldplay's 'Yellow' to Arcade 'Fire's Deep Blue'. "Boyhood" is both a nostalgic time capsule of the recent past and an ode to growing up and parenting. It's impossible to watch Mason and his family without thinking about our own journey.
"Boyhood" takes a one-of-a-kind trip, at once epic and intimate, through the exhilaration of childhood, the seismic shifts of a modern family and the very passage of time. The film tracks 6 year-old Mason over life’s most radically fluctuating decade, through a familiar whirl of family moves, family controversies, faltering marriages, re-marriages, new schools, first loves, lost loves, good times, scary times and a constantly unfolding mix of heartbreak and wonder. But the results are unpredictable, as one moment braids into the next, entwining into a deeply personal experience of the incidents that shape us as we grow up and the ever-changing nature of our lives. As the story begins, dreamy-eyed grade-schooler Mason faces upheaval, his devoted, struggling single mom Olivia has decided to move him and older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) to Houston, just as their long-absent father Mason Sr. returns from Alaska to re-enter their world. Thus begins life’s non-stop flux. Yet through a tide of parents and stepparents, girls, teachers and bosses, dangers, yearnings and creative passions, Mason emerges to head down his own road.
Who are you going to be when you grow up and what’s your life going to be like? As a kid, of course, everything feels much more simple and now there’s so much more that we can see now about how dense and complicated this family’s relationships are. Sister and brother is a really kind of awkward relationship when you’re a kid, and we've that in the beginning because we're more stand-offish with each other at first, and there's more a feeling of rivalry. But that changed a lot as we get older. A dynamic sense of motion underlies the structure of "Boyhood", allowing the audience to be acutely conscious of time’s trajectory and time’s pull, even as they are caught in the grip of the day-to-day events unfolding throughout Mason’s youth. There's a sense that Mason’s life could take any infinite number of turns from this point forward, but all we know for sure is where he has been. "Boyhood" is almost just as much a view of motherhood, as the dance between mother and son plays out while Mason begins in all kinds of ways to assert his independence. Olivia is flawed, and she could be seen as passive at times, but we also consider her a brave mom, a woman who's always trying to balance her own passions with doing the best that she could for her kids.
For example, the scene late in the film where Olivia watches Mason going off to school is really quite the opposite of that same scene in our life when we went off to school, but we also remember it being very intense and heavy, and it seemed that Olivia’s is an equally human and valid kind of reaction. Olivia’s interactions with men, with her children’s father, Mason Sr., as well as a series of challenging, at times abusive, partners she takes up with along with the way, revealing as they do the way we all struggle to really see other people for who and what they're. With Mason Sr., she has sort of put him in this permanent box labeled irresponsible and she sees herself as the only one who has done the hard, day-to-day work of raising these kids. But, of course, she also never sees her ex when he's with the kids, or what kind of father he's really like. She thinks she’s doing what she should be doing for her kids, looking for a stable situation for them, but she can’t see, not the way we can looking back at it, that she's sometimes wearing blinders. Despite the blinders, despite the inevitable stumbles and dangers, Olivia is rewarded with two intriguingly strong, sensitive young adults who really do seem ready, as ready as any of us ever are, to take on the modern world.
Movies have always been about playing with time , about trying to snatch the moments that relentlessly flow through our daily lives and etch them to where we can get some perspective; or about diving into the mythic, dream-like dimensions where time is put through the blender. Even so, nearly all fictional movies are, by practical necessity, made over a period of weeks or months. But could a contemporary drama be made over a far greater stretch, say in the time it takes for one little boy to evolve, year-by-year, shift-by-shift, into a young adult. It's a movie about the singularly private emotions and hard-to-describe experience of childhood, but childhood is such vast territory. It's like taking a great leap of faith into the future. Most artistic endeavors strive to have a certain amount of control but there are elements of this that would be out of anyone’s control. There are going to be physical and emotional changes and that's embraced. Over a very extended range, beyond the life of most stage, film and television characters, going further and further as they revisited them anew each year in shifting circumstances.
It's not only about leaping, but also about staying patient, taking the long view, which is not Hollywood’s standard modus operandi. The "Before" series explored the impact of time on everyday lives,revisiting the same couple at three diverse junctures in their unfolding relationship, but it did so in a very different way from "Boyhood". Of course, one insurmountable problem of time is that it operates in concert with things like chance and uncertainty. People sometimes hear the idea and think ‘oh, it’s like a documentary’ or it’s similar to Michael Apted’s 7-UP. But this isn’t a documentary, it’s a narrative film made over 12 years, which is something quite different. It’s rare to see someone trying to use the medium in a new way, to explore time in a new way. Seeing the film for the first time is an emotional, even cathartic, experience.
Written by Gregory Mann
