How BOYHOOD Helps Me Reassess My Perspective About Life

The first time I watched Richard Linklater’s coming-of-age epic Boyhood was in my sophomore year of college. It was the time where I began to get really into cinema. And it was also a period of my life where I didn’t want to miss out on any opportunities presented in front of me. I was young, optimistic, ambitious, and just full of hopes, seizing as many moments as possible just for the sake of doing it. There was nothing wrong with that, though. In fact, up until this moment, I still believe that your 20s is the time where you have to put your endless optimism into real actions.

But then at the same time, while you’re living your life to the fullest, your parents and family members are also growing up and growing old. I didn’t really realise it at first because I was too busy trying to conquer one milestone after another. I refused to go home from college on summer break because I tried to not miss out on any college activities that were happening at that moment. And this has cost me greatly — I missed out on many familial moments that I could’ve easily experienced if only I wasn’t too blind and proud. It’s not until I watched Boyhood that I began to realise how equally important it is to let the small moments seize you as much as you’re trying to seize the big one.

There’s nothing groundbreaking that happens in the film. Rather, what unfolds is just a mundane story of an ordinary boy growing up in Texas. The boy is Mason Jr., and he’s played beautifully by Ellar Coltrane. When we first meet this 6-year-old dreamy boy, he’s laying on the grass while starring deep into the quietness of the sky, probably wondering is there something up there? Nothing’s special about him, he is just another boy and someone’s son who’s trying to navigate his life day-by-day under the guidance of his mother Olivia (Oscar-winner Patricia Arquette).

Richard Linklater and the Passage of Time

The film traces both Mason and Coltrane for 12 years, until they’re about to begin their first taste of college life. And from moment to moment, we observe his physical and emotional changes. The baby fat in his cheek is no more, the hair is getting darker, his body is thinner, he’s more stable both emotionally and intellectually. And yet, the 18-year old version of him still has no more clues as he was in the 6. Linklater condenses this 12-years journey into a 166-minutes longitudinal study of life, growing up, and family. A narrative that looks like a gimmick, but paid off precisely because what we’re offered here is far beyond that.

The power of this film does not lie in the way it allows us to directly access Mason as he experiences a series of ups-and-downs in life, like his parents’ divorces or the loss and gains of friendships. Instead, what the film and Linklater do best is how it uses the passage of time to argue that our life shouldn’t just be defined by a single moment, but rather an accumulation of all the big and small moments that happen.

This is not entirely new in Linklater’s territory anymore. In fact, the main idea that we often find in most of his works are about the passing of time and its major connection to human life. But while his other films are mainly focused on single events like the official start of college year in Everybody Wants Some!! or the last day of high school in his widely beloved Dazed and Confused, what Boyhood focuses on here is a multitude of moments that passes in one’s life.

We are born, we live, and then we die. And in between those, there are a lot of moments, big and small, that pass and happen to us. Boyhood presents those in-between moments by rendering Mason’s life as he subjects to the passage of time. And in doing so, Linklater allows us to feel that time is really passing in a visceral way that not many films aren’t able to do. But here’s where it gets interesting: instead of using the big, monumental points in Mason’s life, Boyhood is made of smaller, subtler moments that happen between those milestones. Divorce and separation happen more than once, graduation procession also happens, but what Linklater displays on-screen is instead the movements that take place around them, like Mason’s friendly conversation with his best friend after his graduation.

Therefore, Boyhood understands that life is also a series of small moments we are simply to be in, a compilation of feelings and emotions, a collection of experiences and people whom we encounter along the way, an assembly of the moment we spend arguing with our siblings over chores or the moment we do our homework. Boyhood echoes this small moment to encapsulate the real essence of life itself, which is the passage of time.

To Be in the Moment with Boyhood

Whereas Linklater’s body of work on the passage of time remains substantial throughout, the part of the film that — as the title suggested — helps me reassess my life and my process of growing up, is eventually the way it juxtaposes two philosophies of life that Olivia is embodying and Mason is inscribing at the end of the film as he begins his new adventure as a college freshman.

Throughout the film, we witness Olivia trying to do everything to make Mason and his sister Sam’s life better. Pursuing a Master’s degree, getting a good job, remarring a couple of times to give her children  a new family. Everything that she’s done has always been for the sake of Mason and Sam’s happiness. And as we can see in the film, Olivia achieves a lot of milestones that should’ve made her satisfied. Yet, towards the climax, we see her having a massive breakdown right when Mason is about to leave her for college. “This is the worst day of my life,” she claims as she’s watching Mason packs his stuff up.

Even though it’s strange to see har classify this moment as her worst day when we know that she has faced more life-altering challenges before, Boyhood allows us to understand where her anxiety comes from. All this time, Olivia has always been focusing only to seize all the goals and milestones that are presented in her life that it makes her forget about the present. So, when all the life landmarks that at first were happening in future tense become the past tense, she struggles to face the present tense because she thought that there would always be more.

Like what we can see in Olivia, we live in this world with the mentality that if we don’t seize the moment, life will pass us by. Carpe diem makes our life special by achieving one goal and another, seizing one milestone after another. Sure, we are responsible to move things and ourselves if we want to make our dreams come true. But what happens when all of those have been reached? Another goal we want to conquer? Another milestone we should achieve?

Most of the time, we put a hell of a lot of energy into thinking about the past and the future that we don’t realise just how quickly the present moment flies by. I’m certainly seeing myself having the same mentality that Olivia has, and probably you are too. But right at the very end of the film, Boyhood reminds me that it’s important for us to not always be running from the depression of the past or worrying about the anxiety of the future, but live to be present in the moment and letting it seize us instead of the other way around.

Reassessing My Life Through Mason’s Eyes

I began watching Boyhood as someone like Olivia, a person who’s only thinking about the “what’s next” scenario and assuming that I have to seize as many moments as humanly possible. But in the process of watching the film, Boyhood helped me reassess my life from the progress that Mason has made throughout. All his life, Mason’s future has been full of questions and uncertainties. He doesn’t know whether his parents will get back together or not any more than knowing whether he’ll still be in touch with his old friend or not. But by the end of the film, Mason has taught me that there doesn’t have to be more in life for it to have a value. Just simply be in the moment and it will keep the past and the future from stealing the present.

This is what I eventually take from Boyhood, the importance of being present in the moment so that I can live my life more peacefully while not missing out on my family who’s also growing old together with me. Four years have passed since the first time I watched this film. But even now, already in my fourth viewing, not only is Boyhood still everything it was for me back then, the personal impact that this film has still manages to teach me more about my life and myself. And I’m forever changed because of that.

What are your thoughts on Boyhood?