Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is likely to win the best picture prize at the Oscars on Sunday. Critics have been praising it for months, but more than the usual plaudits, it’s inspired a spate of uncommonly personal reviews. So far these have been focused on the experience of fatherhood, but what about the viewpoint of those who are Mason’s age? What does the film mean to them?
For people like me, just beginning to make their way in the adult world, Boyhood represents perhaps the first real taste of cinematic nostalgia. The Toy Story films may have provided a heartfelt look back at the lost days of childhood, but that was a franchise my generation grew up alongside. Boyhood is altogether a more retrospective and quietly heart-breaking proposition. Its realism means time passes without a glimmer of sentimentality. This was your youth, now it’s gone – the Gameboys and Harry Potter launch parties rushing past in seconds of screen time.
Powerful though that feeling may be, it’s not the real genius of Boyhood. Because it is about being a parent, but what does that mean if you haven’t experienced it yet? For me, it made me realise just what my parents must have gone through as I grew up in front of their eyes. I was no hellraiser. I was an ordinary boy, rather like Mason. A bit quiet, a bit surly, not always the most appreciative of what my parents were doing for me.
Two moments in particular made me realise just how selfish and heartless kids can be, just how much I could sometimes be like that. After the family escape a drunk and abusive stepfather, the teenage Samantha rants at her mum about how unfair it is to be dragged away from her old friends and thrown into a new school, oblivious, or maybe just unwilling, to acknowledge the huge emotional stress her mother is under.
Mason remains silent, but seconds later when his mum reaches out to kiss him goodbye he turns away in embarrassment and annoyance. She’s sacrificed everything to raise her two kids and this is what she gets? It makes for humbling viewing.
Even more poignant is the moment Mason is packing his things to move out to college. His mum suddenly bursts into tears at the realisation that this is it; her responsibility for Mason is over. Life as she knew it for the past 18 years is about to end.
“I just thought there would be more,” she says through her tears. It’s a heart-breaking confession at this crossroads. Mason is desperate to escape and begin adult life; his mum is mourning the end of his childhood. Was this how my parents felt when I moved to university? Normally we’re too busy living our lives to stop and appreciate what they mean to those around us.
By stripping away any artificial drama, Linklater shifts the emphasis to these most mundane and human of moments. The sequences that feel the most constructed, like those with the drunken stepfather, are arguably the most dramatic of the film, but they’re also the least relatable. We can sympathise, but we can never truly understand, unlike all those other tiny moments that define our lives.
The communal experience of growing up worshipping the Harry Potter books, the acts of teenage rebellion, which step by step take us further away from relying on our parents and closer to relying on ourselves. Normally a footnote in cinema, here they are front and centre. This isn’t life as we know it, but life as it really was.
