Cinematic Realism In Boyhood, The New York Times

“Radical in its conceit, familiar in its everyday details, Boyhood exists at the juncture of classical cinema and the modern art film without being slavishly indebted to either tradition. It’s a model of cinematic realism.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

Boyhood opens with a shot of clouds floating in a blue sky followed by an extreme close-up on the eyes of Mason Jr., the film’s 6 year-old protagonist. This second shot dollies back to reveal Mason lying in the grass, staring contemplatively at the sky. With these two simple shots, the film establishes its perspective (the unfolding of life from a boy’s point of view) and its tone (laid-back and observational). What follows in the 2014 film, written and directed by Richard Linklater,
is twelve years in the life of Mason from age six to eighteen. Filmed with the same principle actors in short increments from 2002 to 2013, Boyhood condenses the quotidian realities of a boy’s coming of age into 165 minutes of screen time. To achieve a naturalistic unfolding of time and to mirror the reality of one’s life not progressing in clearly demarcated cause and effect events that lead to unambiguous resolutions, Linklater does not force the film’s narrative into the classical Hollywood style of a goal-driven protagonist whose actions are dispersed into momentous plot points throughout a forced three or four act structure.
While Boyhood does employ a classical linear narrative, the film is more episodic than typical of classical cinema. There is no inciting incident providing a conflict that leads to an overarching goal for the protagonist, which is then resolved in the final act of the film. Gabe Klinger in Cinema Scope cites one of the artistic aims of Boyhood as being “to dismantle that convention in mainstream narrative cinema that characters’ lives have to be defined by prescribed momentous events.” Even though there are some such events that occur during the twelve-year narrative of Boyhood (weddings, divorces, high-school graduation), the plot is not manipulated to build up to and land meaningfully on these milestones. In fact, all the aforementioned events happen offscreen in the film’s ellipses from year to year. Boyhood demonstrates that “life’s substance is found in the in-between moments” (Klinger). To achieve this, Linklater often lingers on everyday, seemingly insignificant moments. We observe Mason and his friends riding bikes, spray-painting graffiti, playing video games, and ogling over women’s underwear catalogs; the family playing charades; Mason’s dad, Mason Sr., skipping stones on a pond with Mason and his sister, Samantha; the kids in costume attending a Harry Potter event: Samantha showing a music video on her smartphone to her new stepmom. These scenes add to the film’s overall realism, to its laid-back observational style, while also working to evoke the audience’s own memories of childhood, inviting then to connect and relate their experience to that of Mason’s. Olivia, Mason’s mother, has a line late in the film where she lists a series of milestones to Mason: “That time we thought you were dyslexic, when I taught you how to ride a bike, … getting my master’s degree, finally getting the job I wanted.” Significantly, not one of these milestones, these “momentous events,” occurs onscreen (Koresky).
Although Boyhood is episodic (filmed, as it was, a few days at a time over twelve years), the narrative of each episode does not tell one single resolved story that neatly correlates to each year of filming. Linklater avoids structuring the narrative to tell simple close-ended stories of what happened to Mason when he was six, when he was seven, etc. Nor does he employ titles or any other clues to indicate the passing of another year or the beginning of a new chapter. In fact, the transitions from year to year are often undetectable and are only revealed by a careful observation of the (sometimes) subtle changes in the actors’/characters’ appearances as they have aged another year. For example, at the end of the section where Mason is nine, Olivia is now married to Bill, her former college professor. Bill is shown driving Mason and his stepbrother, Randy, home from a game of golf when he stops at a liquor store. Then, in the following scene, Bill is alone in the laundry room of their home, pouring a glass of vodka and then hiding the bottle in a cabinet. If the viewer doesn’t pay close attention to color of Bill’s polo shirt, it would appear that these two scenes occurred in the space of the same afternoon. Bill hasn’t noticeably aged. It is only when he reenters the house and the children are shown, that one sees how the kids have matured and then realizes that another year has passed.
This positioning of scenes – introducing an element in one year (Bill buys liquor) that is picked up in the following year (Bill drinks liquor) – becomes the dominant pattern that Linklater employs to transition from year to year in Boyhood’s twelve-year narrative. This pattern could be interpreted in classical Hollywood style as the introducing of the “plot point” that ends one “act” which is then picked up at the start of a new act. Following this logic, Boyhood can be said to have twelve acts, one for each year of the narrative. At the end of Act One (Mason, age six; approximately 10.5 minutes long) Olivia announces that the family is moving and Mason Jr. worries if his father (his parents are divorced) will be able to find them. Act Two (Mason age 7; approximately 13.5 minutes long), starts with the family now living in a new town and mainly focuses a visit from Mason Sr. This act ends with Olivia introducing Mason Jr. to Bill, her college professor. Then Act Three (Mason age 8; approximately 6.5 minutes) opens with Olivia and Bill just married and returning from their honeymoon. Although, there are a few jumps from one year-to-year, or “act-to-act,” that do not follow such a strict logic, this organizational device of one year equaling one act proves optimal if one must attempt to organize Boyhood into an act structure.
Continuing with this model, the twelve “acts” of Boyhood vary in length from just under two minutes (Act 4: Mason, age 9) to nearly twenty-nine minutes (Act 12: Mason, age 18). Unlike classical Hollywood cinema, Boyhood does not impose a rigid structure on the number or length of its acts. Nor does it follow a rigid progression of story or character within these acts. To achieve a nonmanipulative cinematic realism in its aim to truthfully represent the childhood of a boy, the film simply floats along, picking up and dropping various threads of its characters’ stories as it goes. The audience is “invited to hang back and observe rather than rely on conventional story frameworks” (Willis 22).
In ways more similar to the modern art film, many character motivations and backstories in Boyhood are never fully explained; plot points are left unresolved; minor characters are introduced and dropped.
For example, when Mason is ten and has long, shaggy hair, he is forced to get a haircut by his stepdad, Bill. Embarrassed by his now practically shaved head, the next day at school he his handed a note by a cute girl in class saying that she likes his haircut. They smile at one another. This appears to be a new storyline, a possible puppy love interest for Mason, but the girl is never shown again. Similarly, at age thirteen, and newly moved to San Marcos, Texas, Mason has an extended scene where he walks and talks with a girl after school. This character also never reappears. Linklater undercuts viewer expectations by introducing and dropping characters. However, these incomplete narrative diversions are appropriate to the broad scope of Boyhood’s story and the film’s realistic intentions; throughout one’s life, many people come and go without major
significance.
Where the classical Hollywood style normally demands an active, goal-driven protagonist, Boyhood features a rather passive one in the character of Mason Jr. Yet, this does not make Mason a boring protagonist. On the contrary, it renders his story more realistic and more relatable to a wider audience since, in most childhoods, a child typically lacks concrete goals and is denied much agency in making major decisions about significant actions. Therefore, Boyhood, especially during the early years, does not concentrate on Mason’s goals, wants, or actions, but is more focused on how, as a child, he is at the mercy of the adults around him. Illustrating this reality, the bulk of Boyhood’s narrative thrust is provided by the actions of Mason’s mother, Olivia, as she falls in and out of bad relationships, moves the family from town to town, and spends less time with her kids when deciding to go back to school. It is not until the final three acts of the film (Mason, age 16 to 18; a total of approximately 56 minutes in length) that Mason becomes a more active protagonist. Again, this reflects reality; as a child ages, they typically gain more freedom and responsibility and are given more agency in making their own decisions.
When Mason is younger and still more of a passive protagonist, he does not drive Boyhood’s plot. Nevertheless, the film’s linear manner of narration unfolds from Mason’s perspective as he observes – almost like a supporting character on the sidelines of his own life –the major events that occur and impact his direction. To strengthen Mason’s narrative centrality, compensating for Mason’s passivity, Linklater incorporates reoccurring point of view (POV) shots from Mason’s perspective. In fact, Linklater establishes this pattern with the first shot of the film (Mason’s POV of the sky). Then, only five minutes into the film, when a loud argument between Olivia and her boyfriend, Ted, awakens Mason, Linklater uses a POV shot showing Mason watching their argument in the living room from the slightly ajar door of his bedroom. Later, around the twenty-minute mark, when Mason Sr. returns and stands outside their house arguing with Olivia, we are shown Mason Jr. and Samantha’s POV as they watch their parents from an upstairs window. A few minutes after that, another POV reveals Mason observing his Mom and Bill’s flirtatious interaction after Mason first meets Bill. A later POV shot, around the 87-minute mark, shows Mason watching Olivia, now a college professor, as she talks to her student, Jim. Similar to the POV shots of Mason observing Olivia fighting with Ted and of Olivia flirting with Bill, this POV of Olivia talking to Jim not only refocuses the events of the plot into Mason’s perspective, but also works to signify an impending change in family dynamics that will affect Mason. After Mason’s POV of Ted, Olivia and Ted break up and she moves the family. After his POV of Bill, Olivia marries Bill and the family moves in with him and his kids. After Mason’s POV of Jim, Olivia starts dating Jim and he moves in with her and her kids. These POV shots shift and filter the events through Mason’s viewpoint, keeping this passive protagonist dominant in the narrative, while also foreshadowing major disruptions to his life.
In Boyhood, without use of the classical Hollywood structure that imposes conflict and forces development, “a series of non-hierarchal situations take place, or perhaps more accurately … take time” (Willis 21).
The film aims to depict what Manohla Dargis cites as being one of the original intentions of film, “to reflect reality as it occurs in time in a sequence of images.” As a result, almost more so than Mason Jr.’s coming-of-age, time becomes the main subject matter in Boyhood. With Linklater’s ambitious and groundbreaking conceit – constructing a film that tells the twelve-year story of a boy and his family, and shooting it over twelve years using the same actors – the theme of time becomes one of the most fascinating aspects of Boyhood. A classical Hollywood production would have been shot over a more typical two to three month period, would have cast several actors to play Mason Jr., and would have used make-up to age the actors playing his parents. With his manner of production for Boyhood, Linklater’s film performs a feat more in the spirit of a modern art film like Andy Warhol’s Empire, where a static long take of the Empire State building is played back at a slower rate, thereby forcing the audience to focus on the progression of time. A similar effect occurs in Boyhood. The audience is unable to not be aware of the real physical development and transformation of the characters as they age in real time. This not only makes their performances more authentic, but
also blurs the line between actor and character, adding a complexity to the film’s theme of time that would be lacking in the more classical cinema approach.