Richard Linklater
Boyhood

[Contains spoilers]

There's a revealing phrase in one of the last sequences of the film; a now-twenty-year-old Mason asks his father: «What's the point of all this?». We could shift the question from the particular to the general: what's the point of a movie like Boyhood? Given its poetics, we might answer that it has the same point as life... and what would that be? Well, Mason's father doesn't have an answer, he doesn't know what the point of life is, but he knows that the important thing is that Mason has felt emotions, that he has felt alive.

This idea could be applied to Linklater's entire film; it's not a "thematic" film, but an immense container that swallows everything. In this sense, Boyhood aims to represent life in its chaotic flow, in its continuation despite everything, in its sudden alternation of joys and sorrows. The point of life and the film is nothing other than life itself, the film itself as a miniature of life; existence is self-motivated, it doesn't have a single point nor a definitive sense, it polarizes around a myriad of issues, of small events that in most cases, when they end, vanish into nothing and leave nothing behind.

And so it is with Boyhood; we have a galaxy of topics, introduced without a precise point of view, but only as facts of childhood and youth of an individual. There isn't really a deep vision of the facts of life, but rather an unbiased representation that aims at an existential accumulation that legitimizes itself by its mere existence. Life is this; it has no plot, no justification: life exists, and we can only take it for what it is. So does Boyhood, which aims to get as close as possible to life.

Among the most pleasant themes we certainly have the child Mason who only thinks about video games, who can't say whether elves exist or not; the artistic and aloof photographer Mason, the Mason always in conflict with his mother Olivia's husbands.

In the representation of life, there are essentially two main strands: on one hand, we have the praise of change, and this materializes in the fundamental characteristic of the film, that is, the choice to use the same actors for a 12-year production period. This obviously allows for an absolute quality in the physical evolution of the people, as it relies on the real physical change of the actors.

The second macro-theme is the relationship between young people and adults; it's no coincidence that we often hear the questions, «Did you do your homework?», «Did you do your chores?». In this relationship, we see the evolution from a purely normative and severe attitude to the acceptance of Mason's human profile for what it is. There is thus a dichotomy between the adults' imposing will on children and the gradual awareness of these children of their legitimate ability to do what they want in life.

There is a negative twist in all this, captured in the dialogue between Mason and his mother just before his departure for college; Olivia realizes that her life, between one commitment and another, has passed in an instant, she hasn't had time for herself, life has slipped away. Here lies a venomous thorn in Linklater's unfiltered view of life: it must be accepted for what it is, not explained, but this can lead to a passivity in living that then brings about dire epiphanies like Olivia's.

Another issue: in finding a roommate at college, Mason is amazed at a computer's ability to successfully pair people based on interests. Apparently, there are 8 types of people: inserting this phrase into a film of this type casts an unsettling light on the entire narrative of the work. Maybe Linklater also wants to tell us that in the end, all lives are patterns, which can vary but only to a certain extent. Even Mason's father, a pseudo-nonconformist artist, eventually reintegrates into the system and leads his ordinary life; sells the sports car for a family vehicle, becomes a family man like so many others.

Boyhood is an extreme work: it takes cinema to a higher level of realism, thus enhancing the expressive code of cinema itself, but it does so with choices that ultimately diminish the language of the seventh art. Cinema is different from life, it thrives on patterns and exaggerations, it polarizes around interesting facts; while Boyhood dissolves these exaggerations into a natural vision of everyday life, trying to extract meaning from ordinary things; things that everyone experiences, perhaps without asking what they mean. That's why Boyhood is extreme; in enhancing an artistic form, it simultaneously exposes its limits and pre-established formulas.

It is a successful film because it is unusual in its choices; it deserves praise for the courage to show normality instead of extraordinariness. It is certainly not a choice that can be replicated so easily; the risk is turning cinema into a more documentary form rather than a narrative one. The narration here is inherent in the faces, in the physiognomic changes, in cyclically proposing various typical and common situations. The meaning is given by juxtaposed accumulation and by the very slow changes that emerge in actions and people. The goal is to portray a phase of life of everyone in its most typical movements, giving a deeply material, physical, pragmatic vision.