I finally got around to seeing the movie “Boyhood.” I assume a lot of people have seen it by now since it’s been playing on Cape for weeks. Someone asked me what it’s about and it wasn’t so easy to say. As much as anything, it’s about the passage of time. Its uniqueness is in that director Linklater took 12 years to shoot it, using the same actors actually aging over those years.
What we get to see, believably, is a family’s life in its process through time, a boy and his sister, their mother and a series of husbands maturing, growing (or shrinking), parents and kids striving with varying degrees of success to find solutions to very believable problems.
It is refreshing to be reminded that it doesn’t take ravening, decomposing vampires to create entertaining, meaningful drama.
The movie suggests a useful dichotomy. There are movies or TV series whose main energy and interest are derived from marginal experiences most of us have little knowledge of—horror flicks, so-called thrillers featuring the antics of international spies or hard-to-kill cops and villains, sci fi with its uppity cyborgs. Much of this sort of entertainment, for which the word “escapist” seems roughly apt, leans heavily on so-called “special effects.”
And there are big and little screen shows which entertain us by delving into and finding drama and meaning in the more everyday, in what most of us can recognize as real life.
The former category seems to be growing, the latter, that of “Boyhood,” shrinking. This may be in part because the special effects guys are increasingly good at what they do and because making special effects the main selling point is easier than creating meaningful stories out of real life.
If “Boyhood”’s drama of the everyday sounds drearily mundane it isn’t. It is, as always when you come to care about a character (or a person) confronting the problems of life, movingly dramatic. To me, even more than dealing with an infestation of zombies.
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