Boyhood

"So what's the point...of any of this? Of Everything?"
"Everything? What's the point of everything? I sure don't know. Neither does anyone else. We're all just winging it. But the good news is you're feeling stuff, you know? And you gotta hold on to that. You do. You get older and you don't feel as much. Your skin gets tough."

Boyhood, as is typical of Linklater, is so understated it's hard to appreciate it on first watch.

But even that says something. Sure, every critic is making a big deal about its innovation in being filmed over the course of 12 years. But don't forget the film doesn't make a big deal of it, and that's important. If it were filmed with the same cinematography as Tree of Life--a similarly profound Texan coming-of-age broad-scope story--there'd be more to immediately draw you in and appreciate. But humility, simplicity, subtlety, understatement: that was the road chosen in every regard. It doesn't make the movie an easily-digestible blockbuster but it does lend itself to transcendence.

It's tempting to wonder if the film would be any good if it wouldn't have been filmed over the course of 12 years, if it could stand on its own without this "gimmick" to lean on. But the two can't really be separated in such a way. It's not so much a gimmick as it is the story itself. The film is the 12 years, the 12 years is the film.

It's in the details of life passing: video games and clothing and music and food and haircuts and milestones and motivational pep talks and a slow, awkward evolution in and out of phases. For me, all these important slices of life captured and displayed in Boyhood were easier to appreciate after the fact, compiled in a trailer or the highlight reel of a critic, and that in turn made me more deeply admire the film as a whole.We tend to think all those phases stop in adulthood, as if growing up is restricted to boyhood and stops at the age of 18 or 21, as if it's just something to endure and survive, but we see here those phases continue all the same.

It's in the human experience: making sense and moving forward on a long road of pain and beauty, never quite arriving, and learning to be okay with that.

It's in the hard questions of an unfolding life: when making immature choices give their natural consequences, and when making supposedly mature choices don't work out like the world says they should.

It's the peculiar irony of life. Because this mom and dad, ready to give so much to their kids, would have in the end really made a great team and saved themselves a lot of trouble if they had stayed together. Hindsight is 20/20. And yet, even in the brokenness of the situation and the tumultuous experiences that come with it, they do still make a pretty good team all in all. The absent father we might have considered a deadbeat and a slacker isn't at all as absent as we thought. He is in fact the most stable, constant thing these kids have. The hot rod he drives giving him an air of rebellion becomes in fact one of the safest and steadiest homes they know. In spite of all the less-than-ideal circumstances, as seems to always be the case in this wide world of unexpected grace, all is not lost.

And perhaps the familiar motto we mutter to ourselves all through the movie becomes a pretty good theme for summing up all of life: My, how you've grown!

Yes, you've grown, and you're never done growing.