24 August 2014

Kids today: Part 4

A would-be masterpiece. And yet ...

BOYHOOD (B+) - As has been hinted at all week, I've never been a parent. If I were, this movie might have bowled me over. As it is, it's a well-wrought drama about a narrow aspect of growing up and growing old, created with a clever production trick.

As gimmicks go, "Boyhood" is as impressive as you can get. Shooting over the course of 12 years with the same actors, Richard Linklater (whom we have watched gradually mature from "Dazed & Confused" and "Slacker" through "Before Midnight") chronicles the life of a boy (and his family) from kindergarten to the brink of college. And if the gimmick weren't so noticeable, this could have been a great film for the ages.

Ellar Coltrane is perfectly bland as Mason, our all-American boy from Texas, because he's the constant in this experiment. It's the events that occur and the people around him (family and friends) that flesh out this narrative -- his divorced parents, Olivia (a shaky Patricia Arquette) and recovering deadbeat dad Mason Sr. (Linlater favorite Ethan Hawke, rescuing the movie time and again); his sister, Samantha (Linklater's daughter Lorelei, who steals early scenes and then mostly disappears in the second half); and Mason's various stepfathers (a pair of stereotypical drunks) and step-siblings (mirror-image ciphers). Olivia moves the kids around as she fails at more marriages, earns a degree and starts climbing the academic ladder. (They bounce from Austin to Houston to San Marcos, but even though they're pretty poor they somehow don't live around any people of color.) It's interesting that Linklater titles the film "Boyhood," because the film is really mostly about him and his 50-something perspective on the world and the past; it easily could have worked as "Parenthood" or "Childhood" (Samantha's experiences are just as significant) or "Adulthood."

The cast is mostly able. Those stepfathers (Marco Perella and Brad Hawkins) are thankless roles, alternately bitter and brooding, either smashing whiskey glasses or kicking over empties, and a scene of domestic violence is poorly sketched out and resolved. The girlfriends (Zoe Graham and Jessi Mechler) offer personalities that tend to challenge Mason's in interesting ways. Arquette searches for depth in Olivia, the practical mom, and mostly finds it. When she breaks down while watching her baby pack up for college, you feel with her that ache of impending irrelevance and the flash before her eyes of all the missteps she has made despite having, despite the odds, produced an able young man heading into the world.

Linklater insists on creating improv exercises for his actors, and the results are mixed. Hawke, from the "Before" trilogy, can do this in his sleep, and though he borders on overly mannered at times, his winking, casual style lends authenticity and gravitas to the proceedings. (I especially liked the way he tried to explain to the boy the transcendence of a Wilco song on the car stereo without sounding like a geezer.) Lorelei Linklater shows promise (like the Apatow girls, earning her spot on the roster) and great skill, but then she is marginalized. (She reportedly asked her dad to kill off Samantha.)

We truly realize the limitations of the patchy script and the cast's passable ad-lib skills when a trio of top-notch journeymen character actors turn up to show how it's really done. Tom McTigue delivers an epic wake-up speech to our 11th-grader as his photography teacher. Richard Robichaux has an Alan Cumming charm and wit as Mason's manic fast-food boss, who seems to ingratiate himself into the kid's inner circle at his graduation party. And Linklater veteran Bill Wise gets in a few late licks while stealing the graduation-party scene as Mason Sr.'s brother, wise-cracking Uncle Steve. The electric jolt that those actors provide is yet another unfortunate reminder that this production was a decade-long slog and that not everyone was up to the task.

Those three men join the chorus of others who are regularly imparting fatherly advice to Mason throughout the years. It's a clever common-man theme to weave throughout the story (along with a satisfying running gag about wearing seat belts). But here, again, the characters merely seem to be standing in for Linklater and his view of a young man's role in it. If you want to make the movie "Fatherhood," go right ahead, Richard.

Mason's male friends are either nonexistent for much of the movie or thinly constructed, with no more depth than Gilbert on "Leave It to Beaver." No matter how well Mason does with the girls -- and the two most prominent ones are improbably beautiful; again, you can essentially see Linklater doting on the casting sessions -- the overwhelming amount of time for a kid like that is spent with his buddies, and to gloss over that time of male development seems to miss one of the essential parts of "boyhood." When Linklater seeks to hit a climax with a male-bonding moment featuring one of Mason Sr.'s old music pals (played by Austin legend Charlie Sexton), the foundation is insufficient for a genuine payoff. (And we won't belabor another valid concern: adolescent boys just aren't that interesting to watch.)

And then there's that gimmick, the elephant in the room. Especially in the first half of the film (which is about the length of a full regular indie feature) Linklater can't help himself in advertising his neat little sleight of hand. He ham-handedly marks the passage of time with the music or technology of that year, as if we wouldn't just notice the kid's voice deepening or facial hair growing in. The use of those glaringly obvious pop-culture markers (starting with a comforting Coldplay classic) might have been a good idea while shooting the film, but to then edit the material and choose to play them so prominently (or perhaps even go back and add them in) is to invite eye-rolling.

Some of those tricks are, admittedly, kind of neat. Linklater apparently shoots real time at an actual Houston Astros game, with Hawke and the kids cheering from the box seats -- but again, that tends to take you out of the narrative when you start to think, "Oh, cool, he's really shooting at an actual Astros game. Did he really luck out with a walk-off home run? Nice touch." (And, of course, he's not doing anything that Jim McBride didn't do in 1967 with "David Holzman's Diary.")

Which isn't to say that this isn't a powerful film with an epic dramatic sweep and the familiarity of family ties. My eyes were slightly misty for most of the last hour or so, and I can't say exactly why. (You be quiet, biological clock.) I choked up at some of the oddest scenes. For instance, Olivia deals with a small-time local contractor about a busted sewer pipe in her side yard, and after he explains, in a heavily Spanish accent, that replacing the whole thing is the wisest course, she agrees and then tells him that he is smart and that he should take classes at the community college. Linklater, unfortunately, ruins that moment when, toward the end of the film, he stuff in a surprisingly sappy reprise in which the young man runs into Olivia (and the kids) and thanks her for inspiring him to go to school. (That scene is also one of at least a dozen false endings that grow increasingly frustrating in that final half hour.)

As noted, this was a dramatic experiment, or perhaps a series of them. And like all experiments, some parts work and some don't. (You shouldn't get extra points merely for having a clever idea; the final product must stand on its own.) As a friend notes, the film reminds us that life is rarely very exciting, and childhood can seem to zoom by -- at least from a nostalgic parent's perspective -- in the blink of an eye (or, say, 165 minutes). It's easy to commiserate with many of the characters (at least for us white folks, it is).

Richard Linklater is a contemporary of mine. He went off and made movies and had children; I didn't. He stayed near his roots in Texas; I ditched mine and leapfrogged him into the Southwest. Because this movie is about him (and my alternate-universe twin) and not about some random boy, maybe I expected more than just a trompe l'oeil quick-flip through a family's photo album.

I won't go so far as to call this film manipulative or mawkish. Sure, there's nothing new about a director getting middle-aged folks to sigh, laugh, cry or cheer in recognition of the agony and delights of raising a child to adulthood; the Hallmark Channel makes its money off of scenes like that every day. (They're called Hallmark moments.) Such tricks of the trade do not result in great cinema, as much as we wish that they would.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Bah humbug, James! You make some good points, but pretty nitpicky for such an interesting and brave movie project. I didn't share you sense of the director showing off. I felt an honest effort by all involved. And while it certainly wasn't perfect, I think the fact that you were a bit weepy toward the end says a lot. I too had tears in my eyes and wasn't even sure why. It spoke to the strange power of that movie, that every life is profound in its own way. Seeing it unfold was overwhelming, for me. Nancy