Badsleeper Life

Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014) is a film with a towering reputation. Critically praised and culturally examined, many have been dazzled by the magnificent scope of the production. It is no doubt an astonishing logistical achievement (that is, filming a movie over 12 years time all with the same cast).

Over its 2 hour and 45 minute run time, we witness the physical transformation of the actors as time performs its terrible dance (more on that later). The concept is certainly this: that as we witness the effects of time on the actors, we will become deeply immersed in the transformation of the characters.

However, I find that an unfortunate mistake has happened. A confusion by which audiences mistake a logistical triumph with a cinematic one. A confusion by which transformation of an actor is mistaken for transformation of a character. And the worst confusion of all: to mistake the things that happen to us for the story of who we are. I believe our culture has gotten this movie terribly wrong.

The film introduces us to a young boy named Mason played by Ellar Coltrane. Both Mason and Ellar are 6 years old at the movie’s onset, and we will follow them both up to year 18. What unfolds will be a series of occurrences. Events. Happenings. A pastiche of coming-of-age tropes.

Mason’s Mom Olivia, a single mother, will be visited by a boyfriend. A boyfriend who is frustrated she can’t spend more time with him. And Olivia will vent her own frustrations about the burdens of motherhood. Mason will witness this, peaking out from his cracked-open bedroom door.

Olivia will inform Mason and his sister that they need to move across the state so she can go back to college and provide them with a better life. They will have to uproot from their home and their school and leave their friends behind.

Olivia will begin a relationship with her professor Bill and soon move in with him. This will be a merging of families as Bill already has two children of his own. Bill will drink, become controlling, scream and break glassware, and become both psychologically and physically abusive. Olivia and her children will be forced to flee.

And so the occurrences will continue on. Mason will have his first girlfriend. He will get bullied at school. He will get heckled by older friends for being a virgin. He will hear vulgar comments from classmates (and from adults). He will experiment with alcohol and weed. He will find his passion for photography. He will have his first break up. And it is precisely this portrait of life that has catapulted ‘Boyhood’ to its status as a seminal work of art. Christened as a groundbreaking piece of cinema.

In my surveying of critic’s reviews, I encountered many comments that declared the depiction of “the ordinary” as being the movie’s defining power.

“Linklater and company sought to deliver a genuine interpretation of a life experience without flashy movie bells and whistles.”



“Boyhood captures the importance of the commonplace and how it’s the endless procession of relatively inconsequential events that most shape our lives.”

“Linklater did the unthinkable, which is to capture our collective youth on film so that we may be able to relive it over and over again.”



“Boyhood may be about Mason’s life, but it’s also telling mine, and perhaps yours too; it may revolve around a boy, but no child, or adult, is excluded.”



The list could go on. Among these excerpts I read words that describe a general theme: that through this examination of the ordinary, Boyhood is not just telling the story of a boy’s life, but telling the story of life. It is a claim that the film explores themes that are universal, the shared threads that we all experience, and that it is capturing “our collective youth.” The film is saying: this is what life is. It is a series of moments that seize you. Not a series of moments to be seized. And here we arrive at the crux of my reflection on ‘Boyhood’. Because it is this claim that I have such utter disdain for. The core artistic element of the film is appalling.

The character of Mason is essentially a passenger in the story. He often feels more like a spectator to the events unfolding in his life rather than a participant in them. He is a vessel for audiences to supplant themselves in his place. Director Richard Linklater places Mason on screen as a kind of living mannequin to stand within his “coming-of-age” scenery. We never achieve any understanding of what it feels like for Mason to hear his mother say she is frustrated with motherhood. What it feels like to have to move across the state and go to a new school and make new friends. What it feels like to find your mother sobbing on the garage floor with a raging alcoholic standing over her screaming “Get in the house, boy! Your mother’s just being dramatic!” How such experiences might disrupt, disturb, color, and transform the inner world of a human being. Or how such experiences might ripple through time and affect future choices, behaviors and relationships. The characters just keep lurching forward through time, with no time for introspection or emotional reflection.

This is Linklater’s mission and the entire point of his project, and it is the movie’s great artistic failure. Yes, we human beings share common experiences and “the ordinary”. We do experience collective culture and go through similar events. And yes, time marches forward relentlessly, and we humans are forced to march forward with it. We experience relocating to new homes, divorces, first beers, first kisses. But no two lives are the same because what we humans FEEL within these experiences is unique. We are one of one. No two human beings dwell within the same inner world. That is the beauty of human existence. It is what I want to see explored when I am experiencing art. I want to understand how these characters feel. A collage of snapshots…of happenings….does not tell us anything about Mason. And it doesn’t tell us anything about life.

One of my favorite reviews of this film that I encountered was written by Scott at ’Three Movie Buffs’. He shares with us:

“Watching this movie I was put in mind of the probably apocryphal tale of Laurence Olivier telling Dustin Hoffman, after Dustin had stayed awake for three days in preparation for a scene, “Try acting, dear boy…it’s much easier.” Someone could have given Linklater the same advice. To film characters in a movie aging 12 years, you don’t have to actually take 12 years to film it. There’s a thing called acting. Of course, without the gimmick…this is just a very long, rather dull, coming of age story.”

I love this Olivier story, however apocryphal it may be, because it reminds me of the many wonderful, compelling stories that have been told in our time using conventional methods. A young boy plays the young version of a character, an old man plays the old version of the character. Simple. Intuitive. Sometimes what is conventional is conventional for a reason. I do believe that many critics were swept off their feet by the spectacle of this movie: the gimmick of its aging cast.



For me, this all calls to mind one of the greatest stories ever told ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens, and one of its perhaps surprisingly profound film adaptations ‘The Muppet Christmas Carol’. In this film Ebenezer Scrooge is portrayed by Michael Caine. When accepting the part, Caine insisted to director Brian Henson that he would play the role “straight” and seriously, as if he were in The Royal Shakespeare Company. This creates a stark contrast between himself and the comical Muppets, but also allows for a dynamic storytelling world, where the Muppets can occasionally cross into a realm of seriousness, and Caine into a realm of silliness.

Within the story, Scrooge is transported to his childhood school, a vision brought by the Ghost of Christmas Past. And it is here we see the first ever instances of levity from the embittered Scrooge. He is energized with a playfulness as he see the images of his former classmates frolicking in the school yard. He follows as the ghost guides him into the school house, and here he witnesses his younger self, hard at work with his studies. While his friends play, he has his nose to the grindstone. He barks “who cares about stupid old Christmas!?” as his friends leave on vacation. Gonzo narrates that “time performed its terrible dance”, and Scrooge watches his childhood play out before his very eyes. An elderly man begins to reflect on the cumulative choices of his life. What he chose to prioritize. And where it has led. He sees a vision of himself, now no longer a boy, but a young man, alongside his former love Belle. A Christmas meeting in which she makes the choice to leave him, seeing the signs of the miserly man he is becoming. The elder Scrooge listens to her song and weeps.

The genius and humanity of this story is contained within these scenes. Scrooge’s life is not a series of happenings: going to school, studying, falling in love, breaking up. But rather it is a life full of choices, of feelings, and of reflections. Scrooge must grapple with questions of whether his life has been made better by his commitment to work, his frugality, and his reclusiveness. He must confront memories of those who he has wronged, and ask himself whether the sins of the past can be made right. He must think about how he will be remembered when he is gone. He must decide whether or not he will change. When experiencing a story told by Charles Dickens, one is never left with any doubt, he is a man who understood the human condition.

In contrast, the central thrust of ‘Boyhood’ is that things happen and life goes on. Mason, his sister, and step-siblings are portrayed as existing within Bill’s nightmarish household with a bizarre stoicism, these vulnerable children seeming almost comically unaffected. One of the most emotional scenes we get from Mason in the movie is him being upset that Bill has forced him to cut his long hair. Mason confronts his mother, telling her that Bill is a jerk. Mason questions why she ever married him. Olivia yells she is doing the best she can. This is some of the strongest emotional content we get in the film. Yet we get all this BEFORE Bill’s destructiveness truly activates and he begins getting violent with Olivia. Something that would be a monumental and traumatic life incident is then never mentioned or discussed again by Mason and his mother throughout the rest of this sprawling movie. Linklater refuses to examine the most potent moments of Mason’s life, or rather, what effect they may have had on him, and consequently does not examine his humanity.

To give the film some credit, Ethan Hawke’s character of Mason Sr. is by far the most compelling. An absent father at the beginning of the story who has been off in Alaska, he returns to Texas one day to spend some time with his kids. We are painted a picture of an immature young guy who had kids when he was even more immature and young. He drives a sports car (with no seatbelts for the kids), he curses in front of Mason and his sister. His fatherly efforts appear put-on, sometimes phony, and certainly trying too hard. At the bowling alley, little Mason wants to bowl with the bumpers up. “Life’s not gonna give you bumpers!”, Mason Sr. retorts.

As time passes, we see Mason Sr. living with pot-smoking roommates and trying to get his music career to take off; classic storytelling signs of a man who is postponing “growing up”. And yet as things unfold further, we see his committed efforts in trying to connect with his children. He wants to ensure them that they can open up to him, to share their inner world with him. He holds down a more reliable job. Gives his son heartfelt gifts. Gives him advice about girls. Shows his son great encouragement and understanding, all while the film does not entirely allow us to lose sight of his flaws either. We even see a scene toward the end in which Mason Jr’s Uncle is grossly blabbering on about all the girls Mason Jr is going to be able to sleep with in college. Mason Sr. looking visibly uncomfortable eventually urges his brother to cut it off. A hint of maturity as time has passed. His final conversation with his son in the film indeed contains reflections about how his life has gone thus far. How maybe things would have been different if he was more mature when he and Mason’s mother had met, or if she had given him more of a chance. Mason Jr. comments “it would have saved me the parade of those drunken assholes”, the only sign of lasting effects we ever see indicated for him.

Nonetheless, the film indeed has something to say about fatherhood, and I do recognize an examination of Mason Sr’s humanity (I also happen to think Ethan Hawke is a great actor). It is nice to see a father on screen who urges his child to share their inner world with him. If only the movie had given a compelling inner world to Mason that could be shared.

Interspersed throughout this rambling showcase of events I’ve already described are a number of incredibly wooden and amateur acting performances by much of the main cast as well as by the secondary characters. We’re even treated to a nauseatingly cloying, stilted, contrived storyline in which Olivia gives encouragement to one of the young Hispanic-American contractors working on her septic line, saying, “You’re smart. You should be in school. You should enroll at the community college.” Of course, years later this same worker will stumble upon Olivia and her kids while they are out at lunch, approach the table, share his incredible success story and attribute it all to her. “Thank you for changing my life.” Olivia smiles, sheepish and flattered. I grimace and twist in my chair, unprepared for the 10,000 tons of artificial sweetener being cannon-blasted down my throat by way of this Hallmark movie moment. This film was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars by the way…Gag me.

The coming-of-age highlight reel ends with Mason at college. Bonding with his new friends. He sits with a young girl who he has just met and they ponder about life. She offers up a spur-of-the-moment antimetabole to put this whole journey into perspective, “You know how everyone’s always saying ‘seize the moment’? I don’t know. I’m kinda thinking it’s the other way around. You know, like, the moment seizes us.” Brilliant…What could serve as a more perfect and profound capstone to this tower of cinematic achievement? Maybe “It’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years!” No no, how about, “You don’t choose love. Love chooses you!”

Or maybe there’s a banality more to my tastes… “We run things, things don’t run we.” -Miley Cyrus