Boyhood

The awards season and the accolades it's received have brought Boyhood back into the limelight, making that piece I've been putting off for several months finally topical again.

I saw Boyhood back on August 30 at IFC. My immediate impression was that the existence of the film was quite a feat, but the film was not mind-blowing in and of itself. While the passive storytelling wasn't extraordinary per se, it was a demonstration of precisely what I love about Richard Linklater's work. His films explore the passage of time like no other filmmaker, and this project seemed like his ultimate experiment.

A lot of time has passed, obviously, between when I saw the movie and now, as I write about it, so I won't bother to list its many fine attributes or plot points, but one of the aspects of the film that has really stuck with me is Mason's characterization. I've heard that many critics, those both underwhelmed and awestruck, felt that Mason was hollow or completely reflective of his atmosphere, that he was too passive or poorly drawn to carry the film. I disagree. One thing I absolutely loved was that this was a true picture of an introverted character in film.

Though my circles were pretty universally in love with Boyhood, I've been hearing a lot of backlash about the film since the Oscar nominations and the Golden Globe wins. Of the most striking critiques, the one about how Boyhood doesn't capture or represent everyone's boyhood, just that of a Texan WASP, caught me a little off-guard. Of course this isn't supposed to be everyone's boyhood; it's just a boyhood. Was that not clear? Perhaps it's just because I'm a black woman and I'm used to watching and relating to others onscreen despite our most obvious differences, but I never assumed I was watching a stereotypical childhood unfolding onscreen before me. Mason's quiet demeanor was one of the most telltale signs for me that I wasn't just watching any kid grow up. Not to say that he was special, but it does seem like every other movie is pedaling a version of the hot-blooded American male that is assertive, loud, non-discerning, and decisive, not to mention white and mysteriously (financially) carefree.

So when I started making out the portrait of a quiet, thoughtful, hesitant kid, I found the idea of Mason refreshing. I also related to it, as someone who grew up with a similar demeanor, and I realized we don't see much of it in film.

Why is that? What other examples of quiet, thoughtful, observant (non-fantastical) characters do I have to relate to onscreen? It seems that they always have an extra characteristic tacked onto them, almost like a shorthand that makes them seem taciturn despite their necessary dialogue or explain their away their silence: the brooding hottie, a la James Dean, Gilmore Girls' Jess, or Steve McQueen's Bullitt; the depressive, like Paul Dano's Dwayne in Little Miss Sunshine; or the psychotic, from Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men to Norman Bates. (Let's table the fact that I couldn't think of any compelling quiet women characters to mention for another discussion.) None of those characters were quiet, thoughtful people who drank in their surroundings just because. Introverted people rarely have the time and space to fully develop onscreen.

I realize that it's much harder to fully develop a character with a rich inner dialogue than it is to create someone who is self-aware enough to just lay their thoughts bare to anyone who will listen. I recently saw Inherent Vice, and I thought Joanna Newsom's Sortilège was a really nice way to voice the inner essence or perhaps higher consciousness of a character. She serves as narrator as well, but she also allows Doc to be as thoughtful as he needs to be in the moment without him having to piece the puzzle together for the viewer himself. That said, all of those moments she was speaking as his conscience, she was doing just that—speaking. Boyhood was also a triumph in my eyes because there was so much space in which to think, to live, to soak up and experience time, just as Mason was doing.

Most viewers take for granted that onscreen characters are often telling us everything that they're feeling. Yes, it is a visual medium, and yes, we bestow awards on those actors who can best channel unexpected, raw, unfiltered emotion while speaking the words of the script. I totally support and understand that. But even emotions and gestures can be loud and attention-grabbing, especially when they are supposed to register what sometimes amount to sweeping changes over the course of a two-hour film. I really loved that Mason's character was able to be carved out of and through time through small, subtle reactions and events. Because we spent so much time with him over the course of twelve years of moments (and, of course, because of Richard Linklater's deft cinematic and storytelling choices), we are able to observe when he chooses to speak up and when he doesn't, when he chooses to actively take part in something and when he chooses to hang back and watch. And the film ends—appropriately, in my opinion—just as he is beginning to take those lessons and accumulated experiences and exercise some agency, as he goes off to college to explore the wilderness and begin to find the right words to say aloud.

I agree that Boyhood is a feat, and that time is really the essence of all of its grandeur: the very idea of the project, the commitment of the cast and crew to such a long undertaking, the passage of time made visible, and the fact that it was finished at all are all impressive successes in their own rights. But I want to also give credit to the kind of characterization that is uniquely possible with this type of project. I was struck by something Ethan Hawke said in a recent interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, that real formative moments don't often happen in the blink of an eye or at one important turn of events; impressions are absorbed and then harden into thoughts and feelings over time, and those thoughts and feelings grow into the building blocks of what we believe as teens, students, and adults. The temporal space of the film gives Mason's character room to breathe and form as slowly as personality realistically does, especially for a quiet, thoughtful person as he turned out to be.