Boyhood confronts us with questions

The late-summer movie Boyhood has received a lot of attention for its uniqueness. It tells the story of boy’s life from age 6 to 18 and is filmed over a period of 12 years, The main actors in the film age as their characters age.

But the film is more than simply a unique approach to storytelling. It also confronts viewers with the poignant passage of time and how quickly our lives go by. This leads to questions about our mortality and what meaning our lives hold.

Boyhood does this without parading lessons about what is meaningful or philosophizing about life’s problems. It does so by focusing on the (fictitious) story of a boy and his family, growing up in Texas in the early part of this century.

The film opens in 2002, when Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) and his older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter) live with their single mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette). Their estranged father, Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), who’s been gone for 18 months, visits them.

Olivia moves the family to Houston, where goes to college. Later, she marries her psychology professor, and the blended family includes his son and daughter. An alcoholic, he becomes abusive, and Olivia takes Mason and Samantha and leaves.

As the years pass, Olivia becomes a college teacher and remarries. Mason Sr. also remarries and has a new baby. Mason Jr. is a quiet, introverted kid who moves from his interest in video games to girls to pot and, finally, to photography. His new stepfather and others tell him he needs to be more responsible and get a job rather than follow his obsession with photography.

Richard Linklater, who wrote and directed Boyhood, shot the film on 45 days, a few days each year, and he added to the script each year, inviting the actors to help in the writing.

Many of his films employ lots of realistic dialogue and occur in what feels like real time. His early film Dazed and Confused is set on the last day of school in a Texas high school. His trilogy Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight each occur over a period of a half day or so.

The characters in those films, as in this one, have plenty of flaws but feel real, even familiar. Mason’s parents make many mistakes and even endanger their children at times. But they also love their kids and want to make their lives good.

Watching this family evolve over 12 years, we feel these tugs to do right, and we feel the remorse of making mistakes and hurting others.

The film is flawed as well, especially in the early years, when the actors are adjusting to one another. Some scenes ring false, such as one of a group of boys talking about sex and drinking when Mason is in eighth grade.

One of the lessons of good storytelling is to use the specific and local to get to the universal. Boyhood is an epic tale, yet it feels intimate. It captures a boy’s life through a relatively few scenes that accumulate details and develop his character to the point where we feel we know him well.

Then we make connections to our own lives, even though we’ve lived in a different time and a different place.

How often do we look back at our own lives—or our children’s live—and think, Where did the time go? And we ask ourselves, What would we do different? What shall I do with the time I have left?

Boyhood is a film that helps us ask those questions while telling us an engaging story.

Killing print is more myopic thinking

Most of you, though not all, reading this are doing so by holding a magazine made of paper. That print medium is under duress in a culture obsessed with immediate profits rather than long-term health.

In an Aug. 10 article, “Print Is Down and Now Out: Media Companies Spin Off Newspapers, to Uncertain Futures” (New York Times), David Carr paints a rather dismal picture of the future of newspapers and magazines.

He reports on how, in just over a week, “three of the biggest players in American newspapers—Gannett, Tribune Company and E. W. Scripps, companies built on print franchises that expanded into television—dumped those properties like yesterday’s news in a series of spinoffs.” 

It’s one more example of how the financial desires of Wall Street are deemed more important than the needs of Main Street, where most of us live.

Although newspapers continue to generate cash and solid earnings, those results are not enough to satisfy investors.

Media giant Time Warner cut loose Time, Inc., the largest magazine publisher in the United States, which carried $1.3 billion in debt.

E. W. Scripps and Journal Communications merged, then spun off their combined newspapers, leaving behind a company focused on broadcast television.

On Aug. 5, the Tribune Company officially introduced a separate publishing division so that it could concentrate on television and handed the new company $350 million in debt.

That same day, Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper publisher and publisher of USA Today, said its print division would go it alone.

Carr compares these events to one long episode of “Divorce Court.” He writes: “It’s not that television is such a spectacular business—there are plenty of challenges on that front—but newspapers and magazines are clearly going to be smaller, less ambitious businesses and journalistic enterprises regardless of how carefully they are  operated.”

What does this mean for those of us on Main Street? It means a diminishment of quality news reporting.

A better question is, Do we care? Are we happy reading opinions (generally the ones we agree with) and looking at cute cat videos on Facebook rather than learning what’s going on in the world and how we might help make it a better place?

Carr doesn’t look to blame anyone. “A free-market economy is moving to reallocate capital to its more productive uses, which happens all the time,” he writes.

But then he points to our apathy. “It’s a measure of the basic problem that many people haven’t cared or noticed as their hometown newspapers have reduced staffing, days of circulation, delivery and coverage,” he writes. “Will they notice or care when those newspapers go away altogether? I’m not optimistic about that.”

We live in a culture where making money for investors supersedes creating a better society for everyone in the long-term. We’d rather build more prisons and live with a crumbling infrastructure than pay for education and help those living in poverty.

Our values are myopic, focused on our immediate desires instead of on the needs of our children or grandchildren.

Leaving newspapers and magazines to make it (or not make it) on their own is one more example of such myopic thinking. We’ll all pay for it.