Ethan Hawke has a very special place in my heart. I might have mentioned this already but it bears repeating. He’s not the hottest Hollywood Hunk, he’s not the best of the best character actors, and the films he appears in span all genres, to the point where he’s been in a lot of stuff I wouldn’t dream of subjecting my eyes to, to a small handful of films that have all managed to make it onto my ever-expanding list of Favourite Films Ever. It’s not about any of that, though; It’s about his ability to stand out as a real person on the big screen – as authentic, as opposed to a character, played by an actor. It started with Dead Poet’s Society, where he was well-cast as the more sensitive of the main group of maybe 4 boys. His performance didn’t come across as contrived, which it very easily could have, but rather his efforts were…effortless. It was liberating. He continued this method of effortless acting in Ben Stiller’s 1994 film directing debut, Reality Bites, where he played Troy Dyer, the ultimate Intelligent Slacker. I saw the film on TV a few years later, at a time where life was confusing and boys even more so, and it made a great impression on me. 20 years down the line and it’s still an important film about that particular time in your life where you’re fully grown but still figuring everything out. This, for instance, is a great argument:
I’ve seen this film 50 times.
Moving onto the last Hawke film worthy of a mention here, it seems that Richard Linklater, who directed Boyhood, which we will be looking at shortly, also has a soft spot for this particular actor. As such, he’s directed 18 films, 8 of which has Ethan Hawke somewhere on the credit list, and one of which is the incredibly interesting first of three films about love starring Hawke and Julie Delpy, Before Sunrise. Yes, as a love story it is super romantic and heartbreaking. Spanning over 24 hours, by the end of which both main characters know that they will have to part, it tugs at every heart string and provokes every tear duct. But that’s not just it, is it? It’s a love story that shows all the little conversations that define human beings and their interactions and relationships; all the looks that would normally end up on the cutting room floor, all the moments of silence that mean everything, and sometimes nothing. Linklater shows everything, and for a love story it’s actually pretty experimental and daring. It’s not glorified, it’s not stylized, it’s just a man and a woman walking around the streets of Paris, slowly falling more and more in love with each other. And it is beautiful. So beautiful, I have yet to find the courage to watch parts two (Before Sunset, 2004) and three (Before Midnight, 2013), in case either of them somehow ruin the illusion of Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Delpy).
If the Before trilogy was experimental , Linklater sure has turned it up to 11 with Boyhood. Filmed over 12 years(!) starring the same cast, it is the unfiltered story of a boy, Mason (Ellar Coltrane) growing up in various places around the state of Texas, with his mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette, yes, Medium, but check out the Quentin Tarantino written True Romance instead, where she plays an adorable badass), big sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s own daughter) and semi-absent father (Ethan Hawke). When we first encounter Mason, he’s five years old, and when we leave him, he’s 18, and everything he encounters, everything he experiences and thinks and goes through in the space of those most formative 12 years (fictionally, of course, but you could have fooled me) is played out, unapologetically, and to the cinematic authenticity fan’s greatest pleasure. It’s so real. It’s absolutely incredibly. The crew filmed each little bit, each little yearly’s scene, over a couple of days from the year 2002 to 2013, and the film is indeed linear, but so oh so varied, not a single segment the same. What’s it about? Life! It’s about growing up and finding your way and being hurt or watching your loved ones get hurt or struggle, it’s everything, it’s nothing, it’s fantastic. It’s not that I don’t want to accidentally reveal the ending that I’m not going into detail with anything because I can tell you the ending right now: he sits on a rock with a girl. It’s not about the ending, there IS no plot, the whole film is the plot. It’s 165 minutes of life, from the point of view of a boy growing into a man. He goes to school, he plays with his friends, he discovers girls, he gets high, he gets into art and every little thing in between. There’s a scene where he looks at what I’m going to assume is the Victoria Secret catalogue with a friend, and the entire scene is literally them flicking through the magazine going ‘those are nice’, ‘oh those are big’, ‘those are nice and big too’. It’s hilarious and adorable and important, I remember the boys doing that so vividly. Different circumstances, different medium, but the same.
Although Mason is the main character (the film is called Boyhood, after all), the film is very far from being just about him. But if the film is about life that would be impossible anyway, because no matter how alone we might feel it is almost impossible to go through it alone, especially if you live with your mother and sister. Both go through their own development. Samantha, his sister, goes through her experience of growing up, she’s only a couple of years older than Mason. There is a toe-cringing scene in which their mother talks to her, with the younger Mason observing, about contraception and it’s so cringing, so mortifying that you want to bury your head in the sand even though you yourself are a grown up and should really be able to see it from the very sensible and rather heart-warming point of view of the mother. Maybe you did, if you saw the film; I didn’t, no kids, so what the film stirred in me was the remembrance of that conversation, and the petrified smile on my face as I thought ‘please kill me, this is so embarrassing’. My point is, there’s time for this, Linklater lets there be time for small scenes, mere moments in time, because they stay with you forever, even if you don’t think about them every day. It’s so reassuring. You feel part of something bigger, the collective experience of growing up is suddenly in front of you, and your own past, present, and future is put into perspective on the big screen.
The mother’s drama, her turbulent love life and struggles to finish her education whilst keeping a family afloat as a single mother, is just as real as the kids’ life experience. Sometimes she’s a hero, sometimes she makes terrible mistakes, but throughout the film she does her best, she, too, grows up, grows calmer, settles into herself. And the dad’s story is interesting too, maybe because he’s, as I said, semi-absent. He dips in and out of the film and Olivia and the kids’ life, a big kid for a large part of the film himself. The chemistry between the parents is most interesting because you can see what was and is no longer there between them, you can feel, very strongly, the frustrations of both, empathising with both at various times. They’re real people, all of them, their story is real, the drama is real.
All four main characters are cast perfectly. Ellar Coltrane is such a curious little boy slowly growing into an awkward teenager. I loved the scenes where he’s maybe 12 or 13, and beyond, and he starts expressing those thoughts on life that seem so original, so philosophical, to us when we first start to realise that life is not just hanging out with your friends. All the questions and observations which are pivotal to us, so important, in those formative years, that we, as adults, can only laugh empathetically at because we remember how clever we felt, and how little it all meant. The sister could, in my opinion, have had a bit more screen time, but nevertheless Lorelei Linklater captures the slightly more inward experience of a teenage girl really well. She, too, is adorable and quirky and oh so clever. Patricia Arquette does a phenomenal job of portraying a mother with her heart in the right place, put in really tough circumstances, and her story is perhaps the saddest, she really has to go through some hard times. But, and perhaps I am biased, for me the most perfectly cast person is and will always be Ethan Hawke. He is just perfect as a deadbeat dad muddling through life, on and off screen, only to take a sharp turn midway through which takes him on an entirely new path of life. My favourite scene takes place on a balcony of a music venue where the dad’s former über-slacker room mate is now playing a gig, and where he’s brought a teenage Mason along to see the show with him. Here Hawke shines brighter than ever as someone who is, in theory anyway, contractually obliged to advise another human being on life and answer Mason’s questions, whatever they may be. And he does, by being honest. ‘What’s life about? Who knows!’
A couple of things before I round off, one good and one debatable.
1) This film does in no way tell you how to feel. In no way. You’re presented with a series of events and how you react to that is entirely up to you. There are some scenes that are easier to react to than others because they’re upsetting and sad, but others are just there… you can laugh, you can shrug, you can do what you want. This, to me, is my absolute film heaven, but I do realise it’s not for everyone. As such, I had a couple of people walk out midway who had had literally no reaction to any of the scenes throughout the film (I kept an eye on them, they were fascinating). I think they walked about because they didn’t know how to feel, they didn’t know what they were looking at. But you have got to stop asking those questions and just take it all in and let it fester. The result is beautiful, I promise you.
2) For obvious reasons, this is not everyone’s story. The film is called Boyhood, but the boy in question is a white, middle-class boy in Texas, not a black, lower middle-class boy, or a boy growing up in the Bronx, or rural England, or Iran or China or a girl, for that matter. I see the problem, mainly with the film’s title as this far from represents everyone’s boyhood. Maybe if it has just been named Boy or The Story of a Boy, or something like that, the pen is mightier than the sword and the choice of title is every so slightly problematic. Not all scenes are relatable to everyone, this is true, but I do think the majority are. I do think that Richard Linklater has done a astonishing job at highlighting all those little moments that are in some way, shape, or form recognisable to all of us, across time, space, race, culture, everything.
It’s a one of a kind film, I have never seen, no, experienced anything like it. It’s a new way of making film, totally original, about human beings. It’s strangely intimate, like watching someone off-camera, and it works sublimely at drawing you in. I came out of a cinema in the middle of Picadilly Circus on a Saturday night and it was like I was looking at the world with a set of new eyes, a new perspective, and that feeling lingered with me for days. I’m going to give this film 6 A-Okays because it’s not often I feel like I’ve just lived my own life all over again, whilst at the same time getting to know 4 people so incredibly well, to the point where they seem like your family. Please go see it, please. Please buy it or rent it, please watch it somehow, because it is a masterpiece.
4 A.M Decisions 