A dad’s thoughts on ‘Boyhood’

There’s a scene in the movie “Boyhood” in which one of the adult characters says something meant to help the central character succeed later in life but that our young hero seems to brush off like a freshly fallen leaf.

Actually, that is just about EVERY scene in the movie “Boyhood,” from the opening scene in which Mason’s mother worries that the boy’s been staring out the window at school too much to later scenes in which Mason gets an endless barrage of “when you’re in the real world” advice from his photography teacher, his stepdad, his boss at the restaurant and, yes, even his mother and father.

So much has been made of the Project of the movie, the fact that it was made over 12 years, allowing the young actors to age on screen. But the beauty of the movie, and its success, is how it is able to harness this process to complexly illustrate how adults often project their worldly wisdom onto children (boys in particular?) without fully understanding (forgetting) the world in which those children are growing.

Every main adult character in “Boyhood” does this. The movie, in the hands of a different director, easily could have resorted to the Dreamer vs. Establishment narrative. That would have been doomed to failure. But Richard Linklater seems more concerned with the interaction itself, and perhaps has more to say about the adults doing the talking down to the children than it does about the dreamer children on the receiving end of their pressures.

So what’s the point? It is telling to me that the mother character, played deftly by Patricia Arquette, is in tears in her final scene, feeling a loss that she didn’t see coming, even though she knew it was coming. And its telling that one of the truest moments of the movie is the final interaction between Mason and his dad, the freewheeling Ethan Hawke.

What is the point of it all? Mason asks.

No one knows, is his dad’s surprisingly tender response.

But we get the key to the movie and, arguably, the answer to Mason’s question in that last fleeting moment. The moment. That life is not a narrative but a collage of moments. In boyhood and in adulthood, we would do best to let them seize us.