The minute Coldplay’s Yellow starts playing during the opening credits of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, we should have known this movie was going to suck. What other song so perfectly captures that specific sort of cheesy melodrama so beloved by a particular type of white teenage boy growing up in suburbia? You know, the ones who play acoustic guitar at parties and talk to girls about their favorite movie (which is definitely Rushmore, though you’ve probably never heard of it). They’re unapologetically sappy to their girlfriends, but only after they’ve been emotionally distant assholes which is why they’re even here in the first place, standing outside a bedroom window blasting Yellow on a boom box hoping to win her back. Growing up on the fringes of boyhood, they’re the unspoken and sly purveyors of toxic masculinity, internalizing everything from the objectification of women to their own self-importance until one day, bamn! – they’re serenading you with Wonderwall at a college party.
Richard Linklater is the kind of director who loves to linger in the conversational moments. His whip-smart Before trilogy about the romance between two adults over the course of their life is one of the greatest cinematic achievements of the century. Like Boyhood, it plays with time, having been filmed over the course of nearly 30 years. But unlike Boyhood, its greatness comes from affording each of its characters space to exist as fully realized individuals despite each another. Boyhood on the other hand, for all its praise, is nothing more than a gimmicky drama meant to make viewers think something unique and profound is being said about growing up when really its nothing more than a cringey coming-of-age story that never quite seems willing to point at the obvious spots on its own rug.
Filmed in pieces over nearly 12 years, the draw of Boyhood is that it employs the same actors from start to finish. Ellar Coltrane, who plays the film’s main character Mason Evans Jr., was only six years old when filming began. While there is something fascinating about watching his character grow up over the course of the movie, once you get over the shock value of Linklater’s casting decisions, this quirky tactic isn’t quite as profound as viewers are made to believe. This is because the film’s loose plot never really seems to understand what it wants to say about young boys and youth culture.
Mason and his older sister Samantha (who is played by Linklater’s own daughter Lorelei) grow up in Houston with their hardworking mother, Olivia (Patricia Arquette), only occasionally seeing their slacker father (Ethan Hawke) on the weekends. Throughout their childhood, they are subjected to Olivia’s abusive boyfriends-eventually-turned-husbands and they spend much of their adolescence moving from town to town trying to escape. There is nothing stable about their upbringing, and though their mother does her best to protect her children, she can’t shield them from the outside influence of the other adults in their lives.
This is where Boyhood becomes confusing. There are moments where viewers are led to believe that Linklater is trying to make a statement about the heavy-handed influence of the toxic men in Mason and Samantha’s lives — not a single adult male character in this film is redeemable. But by the time the movie’s credits roll, Mason, who is now an 18-year-old young man fresh off to college, doesn’t really seem to have realized anything that profound about growing up amongst them. We know he’s been subjected to everything society has come to associate with being a boy — secret peeks at lingerie catalogs, “locker room” talk and abrasively masculine men who drink too much alcohol, beat their wives and demand respect — but we never quite understand just how these men and these experiences have shaped Mason’s own becoming. A more nuanced observer might find it tempting to say that Linklater is trying to set Mason apart from these men. That by making him grow into a hyper-alternative young adult who lets girls in study hall paint his fingernails blue, he somehow has escaped the very same traps of male adulthood that his father and ex stepfathers fell into. But in actuality, Mason’s own privilege and superiority as a white male is really only buried beneath his outwardly complex exterior.
This is perhaps most evident when we observe Mason’s interactions with his high school girlfriend. For much of their relationship, he treats her like his personal tape recorder, talking at her rather than with her about his grandiose feelings about the world. In the beginning, she is enamored with his problem with authority, but eventually she leaves him for a college boy who isn’t such a downer all the time. Mason is perplexed by this. He is also angry, and even though his anger towards his ex is reflective of what you might expect from a high school romance, one can’t help but feel like Mason is just a slightly toned-down version of Timothée Chalamet’s Kyle in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. At first his moody and mysterious persona makes him seem more mature than other boys because he reads cool books and doesn’t have a cell phone, but if you hang out with him long enough, you realize that actually, he kind of sucks.
Perhaps what’s so infuriating about Boyhood — aside from the fact that it often feels like literally everyone thought this movie was a masterpiece when it first came out — is just that. While it’s obvious the men in the film are horrible people to their partners and their children, the movie never addresses the fact that by behaving as such, they still pass on that same inflated air of self-importance to their sons who may seemingly reject it all while still internalizing it and exuding it in quieter and possibly more destructive ways. There’s no doubt that if we followed Mason’s journey for a few more years, he would have become one of cinema’s greatest fuckbois, forcing women to pose for his shitty photographs and listen to his incessant complaints about the world at large.
Which leads us to the film’s greatest problem: whiteness. In the movie’s whopping 165 minutes, there are barely any people of color. In fact, the only real scene between the main characters and a person of color comes in the second act when Olivia emboldens herself to tell a young Latino man working on her house that he can have a better life for himself if he only just puts himself out there and goes back to school. But if that isn’t bad enough, in a bizarre twist of white savior fate, it turns out that that boy actually takes Olivia’s advice. In a later scene, he awkwardly thanks her for encouraging him all those years ago, causing all non-white audience members everywhere to let out a collective groan. And yet, even though this racially tone-deaf moment might cause many to recoil, it is true that Olivia really is the glue holding everyone together. Not only has she inspired a total stranger to turn his life around, but she has also managed to uplift herself and her children into trying to achieve better lives for themselves. Which is why it’s all the more disheartening to see Mason react with little to no sympathy when Olivia has a near-breakdown in front of him over the state of her life. “I just thought there would be more,” she tells him, but the camera doesn’t linger too long before we’re off with Mason on the road to college. Sorry, mom! Beer pong!
In the movie’s final scene, Mason, after taking an edible and walking into the mountains with some new college friends who are too cool for freshman orientation, has what is sure to be the first of many enlightening conversations with another college girl. “It’s constant. The moments. It’s just, it’s like it’s always right now, ya know?,” he tells her. It would seem easy to make a parallel between this scene and the previous one where Olivia laments about her life being nothing more than a series of cleared milestones, and perhaps what Linklater wants us to believe is that those moments are all we have. That the “more” Olivia hoped for doesn’t exist. But the crucial thing missing from this revelation is that for Mason, despite his difficult childhood, he gets to go off and have a life inundated by his own white male privilege while his mother, his sister and all the rest of us do not. We are the ones left to carry the weight of the carework, the emotional labor, the jobs no one else wants, while Mason gets to take his photographs and wax poetic about the meaning of life to girls who think he’s got it all figured out. Indeed it is always right now, Mason, but only in your own white male-centric universe. The rest of us are still out here fighting our pasts so that we might be able to create a better future.
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