OK, I know. I never commented on one of the
biggest debates this Oscar season. Boyhood Vs Birdman. Mainly because I hadn’t
watched either at the time * hangs head in shame* . However! However, this is
about to change. I have watched Boyhood. I have an inkling I “get” what happened.
Of course I have an opinion on it. It really isn’t the kind of debate you have
the luxury of not having an opinion on if you write about film…
And hand on
heart, Boyhood is not the kind of film you have the luxury of not having an opinion
on, once you have watched it. At the very least, at a whopping 3 hours long
(close enough) you will think it’s the biggest wastes of your time since film
began. I personally have it down as one of the best viewing experiences I have
had since I first ever saw pulp fiction. The fact that I quote pulp fiction on
a daily basis should give you some idea as to what that means to me. By that, I
don’t necessarily mean it was better than Birdman. I haven’t seen Birdman
(yet). I wouldn’t know to compare. That said, I think we have a matter of comparing
chalk and cheese here. But hang on, I am getting ahead of myself.
Of course
the central “gimmick” of the film is well known. Linklater brought together an
ensemble cast and filmed the pivotal moments in the life of a family over the
course of 12 years. Our hero is, as the name suggests the son of the family
Mason Jr (Ellar Coltrane), but his parents are also (Ethan Hawke and Patricia
Arquette) are also around as is his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater,
director Richard Linklater’s daughter) and all the other characters who come
and go – but sometimes stay – and all change the lives of the family for ever…
Now, I have
heard quite a lot of the moaning connected to this film. Chief among them was
the fact that the film seemed to “go nowhere”. Truth be told, I can see where
they are coming from, the film is a series of vignettes, some quite short
“moments” some longer periods, all at different (though, mercifully,
chronologically ordered) times in the life of the family. There is no clear
announcement as to whether the timeframe has changed or not, other than
context, and you have to do a quick mental recap, figure out what you have
missed, what bit of the story you are at now as you get into the next “bit” of
the story. The mental effort needed is not great, but it is there all the same.
The ending is open too. It ends at a “kind of” natural end, but it’s only an
end because the film makes it that way, the way the story was going we could
have happily meandered after Mason for another 10 years (though I’m not
entirely clear what this would have done for Ellar Coltrane’s sanity)… But what
is the point! I hear you cry. The point, dear viewer, is that there is no point.
It is
theory of art 101 that the main function and in fact duty (according to some)
of art is to examine the human condition, to hold a mirror up to society, to
humanity and show us who and what we really are. That is precisely and exactly
what Linklater has done, with painstaking accuracy. Try thinking back on your
own life. You don’t remember every single day. They all run into each other,
with only random days, conversations, moments emerging from the blur. If you
were to take them out of your head and edit them together, something pretty
much like Boyhood is exactly what you would get. Linklater hasn’t just stood on
the sidelines and given us a nice, prettified “story” of a character with a
beginning, middle and end. He has taken us right into his memories. He has
written us an essay on what kind of moments it takes to form the character of a
person and put it on screen. The result… Is eerily like life itself…
In this
context, one of my favorite moments in the film is a split second when we see a
picture of Mason and his father from quite a few years ago, quite later on in
the film. Even the viewers with the greatest tendency to skip details will not
fail to remember the timeframe the picture was taken in, as Mason reminisces so
do we, and we can almost see right into his head – because that day is not a
Hollywood style “montage” or dramatic scene, it’s (almost) a memory, in amongst
our own memories…
Except of
course, it is never that simple. The whole way we have to puzzle part of the
story out for ourselves will “throw” some viewers. As will the choice of life
changing moments, to give but one example, although there are several weddings
in the story, we actually see none of them – even though they would almost
certainly have been chosen for any mainstream film.
Apart from
its rather extraordinary story, I have to praise Boyhood for its cinematography.
There were things about Mason and Samantha’s childhoods that brought back
massive pangs of nostalgia, the Tetris video games, Samantha doing Brittney Spears
impressions and so many more little details that all of us of a certain age can
easily recognize. And once you get over the fact that this is not a “show” so
to speak, this is what adds another layer of personal connection to your
interaction with the film, not only are you witnessing emotions of real life,
there is a whole blanket of nostalgia that will envelop you with a whole host
of your own memories flooding back to you. I mean if the cinematography won’t
do it, the soundtrack almost certainly will. Coldplay, Arcade Fire, Bob Dylan
and Lady Gaga all come together on a wonderful road trip through the musical
soundscape of a decade…
What
Boyhood doesn’t have of course is the highly technical direction Innaritu seems
to have applied to Birdman (from the little I have seen of it). It does not
show off, if doesn’t have extraordinary long takes, fast paced editing and the
kind of soundtrack the world and its dog seems to love to hate. Nor is it that
Hollywood darling, a film about filmmaking. I kinda see what happened there…
That said, would I go full-hog and jump onto the #Boyhoodwasrobbed bandwagon…
I’ll have to watch Birdman to be the judge of that… Keep watching this space…
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