BOYHOOD

(Richard Linklater, 2014)

So much cinema is about so little. Filmmakers manufacture conflict, finesse character arcs and shape story lines, all to bow down to the great God of "story". That is obviously not a bad thing in every case. But when that story is about nothing, amounts to nothing, says nothing, provokes nothing; when real life and humanity and thought is more or less absent from a work of "art", it can be hard not to ask yourself what is the point of it.
Richard Linklater generally makes films about life. That sounds like a simple, small, obvious thing. But in modern American cinema it is precious and actually quite rare. And Boyhood may be his best conceived and most fully articulated work; a film about the magic of everyday life and how difficult that is to appreciate, a film about time and the way it slowly steals our lives from us, minute by minute, day by day.
The process is the aspect of this production most of the promotional material focuses upon; shot for a short period with the same cast annually for twelve years, we watch young Texan Mason (Ellar Coltrane) grow up as his life and circumstances change around him. His mother (Patricia Arquette) grows from a stressed young single Mom into a College Professor, mourning the loss of her life as her youngest child prepares to leave the nest, acquiring and shedding a couple of husbands along the way. His father (Ethan Hawke) goes from an irresponsible but fun free spirit to a "boring old fart" with a mini-van and a new young family, consistently giving Mason heartfelt advice based on his own mistakes and revelations.
His sister (Lorelai Linklater) and he move house several times, change schools and stepdads, by turns stoic and petulant. All of these characters are complicated and believable, their complexities and quirks revealed incrementally over the years. Mason himself is a quiet, watchful presence for most of the first half of the film; we hear other people's opinions of him more than we hear his own. And then puberty hits, shockingly, and he is suddenly a pretty, moody teen, and a conversation with his father on a camping trip is followed later by a long reveal of his sensitivity and distinctive view of the world in a romantic chat with his first love. Suddenly this young man comes into focus, a product of all the influences we have glimpsed, and more fascinating for that.
There is something so casually profound in this it is almost impossible to process on a first viewing. Like in life, scenes just pass by, people change, circumstances alter. This prosaic quality is a big part of what makes the film so profound. This could be any life, every life. Linklater refuses the easy dramatic option on so many occasions it cannot help but underline this universality. The one real passage of melodrama - his mother marries an alcoholic at one point, and his abusive, violent nature doesn't take too long to reveal itself - is shocking because it is so different from the rest of the film. It is also brilliantly written and acted, and, like everything else here, beautifully naturalistic. The cast are all excellent - so much falls upon Coltrane's shoulders and he carries that effortlessly, with a quiet, mysterious charisma that is intensely watchable. Arquette reveals her character's strength best in desperate times, and her final moment of emotion as her son leaves may be the most moving moment in the film, and Hawke has perhaps the showiest role and really, evidently enjoys that and the many speeches he gets to make about women and politics and the Beatles and the meaning of life.
While Boyhood is fundamentally a coming of age story, it is so many other things besides. It is a story of family, of how we need and rely on support networks, of how parenthood changes people. It subtly portrays the way technology has changed our lives over the last decade. It's soundtrack is perhaps a tad too on-the-nose at times in its use of so much indie to track Mason's movement through the Noughties.
It contains lovely little moments and juxtapositions like the one where we see him shyly walking and talking with a female schoolfriend who informs him her friend has a crush on him, then witness him and his friends acting experienced and knowing about females with the older brother of a friend.
It offers a telling, poetic portrayal of young love and its inevitable dissolution. And miraculously it ends on a lovely moment of promise, potential and excitement.
It runs for almost three hours; yet flies by, and I didn't want it to end. It is magnificent.

BEFORE MIDNIGHT

(Richard Linklater, 2013)

Linklater's series of "Before" films have shadowed my life. I'm roughly the same age as the characters and it has been startling how accurately each film has zeroed in on the concerns and preoccupations of its chosen decade in the life of an educated Westerner. But more than that, these films have been incredibly articulate about the mood of each phase in a life - the way experience changes our perception of the world and of ourselves. Before Sunrise reflected the hopeful romanticism and yearning for adventure of the early 20s. The even better Before Sunset captured the slight disappointment; the sense of mistakes made and chances missed, of the 30s. And now, the dawning reality of family life is evident in Before Midnight.
It finds Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) at the end of a holiday at a villa in the Pelopennese in Greece where Jesse has been invited on a sort of writer's retreat. They have been a couple, it emerges, since the end of the last film, with a pair of beautiful twin girls and a family life in Paris. The plot here differs slightly from the first two films, in that we see them interact with various other characters in the second act here, engaged in a lengthy dinner-party chat with three other couples before they head off on a stroll into the nearby town for a romantic night in a hotel. That stroll begins as one of the conversations we saw in the other films and then turns much darker, as all the tensions and resentments of any couple in a long term relationship emerge when they reach the hotel.
It is, just like the other two instalments, fascinating, at times hilarious, moving in it's simple warm, recognisable humanity, and utterly brilliant. Linklater has never been an ostentatious director, and he just lets his actors do their thing, trusting that they (co-writers, remember) know these characters. The camera maintains a respectable distance and yet misses nothing. The script and cast miss nothing, either, making this trilogy of films perhaps the greatest I have ever seen at capturing all the complex dynamics of the way people actually talk.
The argument that forms the last half hour here is beautifully observed, a surging, constantly mutating string of insults, logical positions and negotiations familiar to anyone who has ever had an argument with a partner. And what is at stake is universal - Jesse and Celine are talking about their specific circumstances, but really they are intent on the question of love; if it lasts, what it means and what it gives, how it can be sustained and if we expect too much of it (all of this is made explicit in that early dinner party conversation).
They acknowledge that they are the great loves of one anothers lives, but the question is: is that enough? It may be at 24 and 32, but at 41?
One slight criticism may be that this film is a little more involved with their shared life. In the first two films we learned about them as they learned about one another, but here they argue about incidents they have been through together, air gripes based on old events. But that is a small detail; even those scenes are ludicrously interesting, and Hawke and Delpy make it all work, make it all feel real. These characters feel like old friends to me, and that warmth is a key part of how these films work.
But they wouldn't work without these two actors or that connection with the issues that are relevant in the lives of people like them.
They do work, and then some.

BROOKLYNS FINEST

(Antoine Fuqua, 2010) There are three intertwined story threads in Brooklyn's Finest, each of them seemingly attempting to pack in more cliches than the others. Each focuses on a different cop. There is the ageing beat cop Duggan (Richard Gere), burnt out and cynical and with no life beyond the job, with only seven days to retirement. Then there's the Vice Detective Sal (Ethan Hawke), bowed beneath the financial responsibility of raising a family to the extent that he begins to steal money from drug busts. And finally there's Tango (Don Cheadle), so deep undercover with a drug gang that his old life has disintegrated and he has begun to doubt which side he's on. These three characters are set on a collision course, of course, but not before the plot has forced them through some tortuous scenes familiar from a dozen cop movies and tv shows. There are plenty of double-crosses, macho standoffs, shootouts in drug nests, nagging wives and hollow cops staring out of windows, alongside all the gangsta posturing and reactionary New York Cop braggadocio. Duggan's only friend is a prostitute he frequents and has fallen in love with. Sal is increasingly frenzied and unpredictable in his desperation. Tango has to get off of undercover before it destroys him, but his loyalty to a gang lord who has saved his life (Wesley Snipes) is a conflict for him. All of this familiar genre storytelling can only end one way - in gunplay. This is a story only violence and death can resolve, and sure enough there are bullets and some major characters don't make it. It seems to take the position that being a cop in a city with as much moral compromise as New York - or at least Brooklyn - is an impossible job, and one that destroys any who attempt to do it, but its approach is a tad too pulpy and a little too generic to say anything interesting about the issues it raises. Instead it settles for obliterating them with gunfire. What makes it watchable - to the reasonable extent that it is - are the performances. The dialogue in the script is serviceable, with a few compelling speeches, but the three leads each give it a dose of intensity and charisma that jolts it along. Hawke has the showiest part, all sweaty angst, and Cheadle is a powerful presence, but Gere is perhaps the standout, exuding a moral weariness and armouring himself with a jaded detachment which is only given more potency by the movie star aura he still possesses. He is slightly mannered , but his storyline is the least well-assimilated here, but that may help it and him. The supporting cast is classy, filled with alumni from The Wire alongside the likes of great character players like Ellen Barkin, Will Patton, Vincent D'Onofrio and Lili Taylor - none of them given much to do - but Fuqua makes it all look a bit too slick, all shining surfaces and pretty lights. He has directed enough action films to know how to make an action scene pop, but the kind of grit and complexity the world the portrays here demands is absent in his direction of this story, and that's a shame.