Boyhood, 20.8.14

Mason Jnr (the 6 year old Ellar Coltrane) as we first saw him

Richard Linklater’s Berlin Silver Bear winner was a Bildungsroman examining how “time’s winged-chariot” deals with both children and parents.

Media coverage rightly focused on the extraordinary feat of filming the same fictional family, in cinema verité style, over twelve years. 

We watched Patricia Arquette (Mom) and Ethan Hawke (Dad - Mason Snr), unmarried American parents of modest means, split, move, marry, divorce, remarry and divorce again, while bringing up two children through this maelstrom of changing relationships.  Arquette was particularly impressive at conveying the low-key decency of a Mom who’s serially disappointed by men (“I thought there would be more”, she concludes - about life rather than men).
 

Mason Jnr's Mom (Patricia Arquette), who matures 
as much as either of her children

The eponymous boy Mason Jnr (Ellar Coltrane) went from six to eighteen before our eyes, in tandem with his slightly older sister Sam (played by Linklater’s own daughter Lorelei). 

Yet while we saw Mason Jnr grow up, for him, as for many teenagers, life was always elusively in the present tense (“It’s like it’s always right now”). 

Linklater’s typically Texan-set film was a languorous moody affair, more interested in the mundane realities of relationships and family life than broader social issues.  There were a few topical references to Iraq and the 2008 Obama campaign (Dad swiped some McCain billboards).  Many of the rites of passage were specifically American: baseball and bowling with Dad and a, to European eyes, creepy vignette where Mason Jnr was given a shotgun for his fifteenth birthday by doting bible-bashing hick step-grandparents.  A few more troubling episodes apart (for instance when Mom was beaten up by her alcoholic second partner), the focus of the movie was on showing children's personalities developing - not least in opposition to adults’ frequently cack-handed attempts to guide them.

Finally accepting responsibility:  Dad (Ethan Hawke)
takes his son away for one of many single-parent weekends

Linklater ‘s trademark mood of slightly bemused directionlessness, memorably essayed in “Dazed and Confused” as long ago as 1993, was repeated here at deliberate length.  The pace of the 2 ¾ hour screen time occasionally flagged but the film worked far better than Terrence Mallick’s “Tree of Life”, which tried to cover similar territory more impressionistically.

The universality of the theme, despite the particularities of the American setting, virtually guaranteed a positive audience response, helped by Linklater’s refusal to sensationalise.  Motley had two main cavils. Firstly, with the exception of one Hispanic, there was no attempt to represent America as the melting-pot that it is, with African-Americans in particular conspicuously absent.  Secondly, as many others have commented, flick was mis-titled and should have been called “Family” or “Motherhood”, since it was as much about Mom, Dad and the Sister as about the Boy. 

"The Three Ages of Boy":
Mason Jnr at 6, 14 and 18

That said, compared to the pap that Hollywood generally churns out, kudos is due to the “auteur of Austin” for a sensitive, acute and authentic portrayal, from admirably multiple perspectives, of the transfer of the baton between the generations.