I fell in love with Boyhood when it first came out in 2014.
I’ve always loved Richard Linklater’s movies, especially the ones “where nothing happens.” Part of this love came from the dialogue, but much of it was a result of how much the movies were touch points for my own life. Linklater and I both grew up in Texas towns of roughly equivalent sizes—he in Huntsville, myself further south. When I watch his movies, not only do I see that influence, but I feel it, too.
Slacker and Dazed and Confused displayed an Austin that I just barely got to experience, and the latter showed a teenage life that was little changed twenty-five years later. To my younger colleagues who have never known a post-adolescent life without smartphones, I often point to that scene in Dazed and Confused, driving along the main strip, hoping to run into someone who knows of something to do.
Meanwhile, Bernie showed how pervasive small town gossip is, and Apollo 10 1/2 is in many ways just one long “hey remember this thing of this city that you grew up near?” even if much of it was thirty years before my own childhood.
Even the Before… trilogy, so far removed from Texas, had enough that I could see myself in much of it. That faux-intellectual young Jesse? I’m afraid to admit I wasn’t far off. And who hasn’t had that temporary connection that had to end, but left you wondering “what if?” (Which is why I’m so in love with the second and third films, which show the realistic answers to that question.)
And, yet, of all of the films, Boyhood is the one that most closely mimicked my own. It’s not a biography, but that period of time was my own, and those places, too. So when it first came out, I was enthralled. I watched it three times in theaters, including two viewings two days in a row. Here was a movie that was a mirror.
I told Travis, my friend from college, about the movie. He and his wife Ashlee were always a bit ahead of the rest of us. The first to get married, the first to have kids. Travis told me that he had read somewhere that the movie was really about the mother, not the boy. I thought it interesting in a light way, like the theory that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is about Cameron, not Ferris.
Then ten years passed, and I put the movie aside. I moved countries, got married, and had a couple of kids.
On watching the movie again, Travis was right. The movie is about the mom. Well, the mom, the boy, and the dad, all.
I’m not the first one to notice or talk about how we can see different books or films in different ways at different points in our lives. Nothing I’m saying here is original.
But still… I was surprised to see how differently I saw the movie. On the first viewings, Mason Sr. was a side character who gave color to Mason’s life and explained some of the family history. In this latest viewing, as a father myself, I found myself vexed with him early in the movie. How does he not care for these kids? How can he possibly justify going to Alaska to “figure some things out?” And I likewise felt a sense of relief as he settled down, getting the most boring job imaginable, and shaping up to be a better father in his second marriage. Too late for Mason Jr. and Samantha, but some redemption nonetheless.
I even found myself sympathizing much more than before with Jim, Mason’s mother’s second(?) husband(?). (The movie’s not clear whom she actually married, other than still awful college professor Bill.) Jim’s an Iraq veteran who ends up at a dead-end job at a local prison. He drinks too much, and his interactions with Mason have an edge to them. It’s clear that this isn’t where Jim thought he would end up or the marginal impact he expected to have in the world. We’re first introduced to him as he’s telling a story about his time in Iraq, and how he navigated that world with some cultural sensitivity that led to not a single soldier dying during their tour, an unusual occurrence. And yet he’s facing middle age in a situation he didn’t expect.
Mostly, though, what was most different about this viewing is how hard hit I was by the passage of time. It’s hard sometimes to know when a scene change represents a passed year in Mason’s life. You have to orient yourself with the music and small clues. Other times it’s obvious—there’s suddenly a lanky young man where a pudgy boy was.
I had heard, but not understood, how true that is as a parent, as well. There will be days when time feels like it isn’t moving at all. Then I’ll go on a business trip, come home, and my son’s saying words I’ve never before heard from him.
”You know what I realized? My life it just going to go, like that. Just a series of milestones.” That’s Mason’s mother near the end of the movie, as he’s eager to leave her. It’s a line that’s more resonant ten years later.
This is far from the only movie that has changed for me as I’ve gotten older. It’s a Wonderful Life went from schmaltz Christmas movie my own mother forced on us to a movie about a dad who struggles with his anger and his feelings of missing out on what he thought life would be as he approaches middle age. (“I just thought there would be more,” Mason’s mother echoes as her son is headed to the door.)
But for a movie with which I so clearly identified, Boyhood has been the clearest example of becoming a different film altogether as time has passed and I’ve entered a new part of my life, and as I become the supporting actor to the two main players dozing in the rooms down the hall.