*This post guaranteed to stay spoiler-free.*
This weekend, between shifts at my new sandwich shop job, I sat down to watch the movie Boyhood. I knew little-to-nothing about it going in, besides the fact that it was filmed over the course of 12 years, with the same cast of characters.
I've had a hard time articulating to people why I enjoyed this film so much. Normally, I'm a fan of the development of characters in TV shows over movies. In a show, the characters have time to truly develop and change over the course of the show's seasons. The intriguing thing to me about Boyhood was the fact that, while it's running time neared three hours, it stood as more of a vignette of the struggles and life of a child of divorce through the primary grades.
While I have seen a few people criticize the film for lacking plot, I think that was something I found refreshing and different about the movie. It's narrative wasn't tied up in the events that were occurring to the characters; the narrative was the characters. The loose events that occurred in this young man's life throughout the course of the film were tied together to show how family, big moves and our surroundings can all make an impact on how we develop.
Another thing I enjoyed about the film was how organic it felt. Partially because filming took place well over a decade, you saw all of the details of life as it changed and advanced during the course of the first decade of the new millennium. Most films have to carefully create the feeling through the use of appropriate, period props. Boyhood, on the other hand, portrayed these things as they changed. Even the soundtrack helped me to keep track of roughly what year the scenes were taking place.
Finally, I think Boyhood resonated with me because it had so many small, but deeply relate-able, moments. In several of the struggles of the main characters, I saw parallel struggles to members of my family. Many bits of Mason's wisdom as he grows up hit home with me, too. His conversation with his girlfriend about deleting his Facebook, and this odd dynamic we've begun to create where our relationships are some strange hybrid of electronic correspondence with smatterings of face-to-face interaction, hit home with me. We hide behind our screens, and sometimes I find myself a bit surprised that this doesn't bother us more than it does.
If you have a low-key weekend evening ahead of you, I highly recommend spending an evening with this work by Richard Linklater.
