Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans

Boyhood (2014)
dir Richard Linklater

There is a moment towards the latter stages of Boyhood where Mason junior asks 'What's the point of it all?'
He is asking his father, who can offer no answer or clues as to the meaning of why we are here.
Both the cast of characters, one presumes, and the audience will have similar notions at various stages of this sprawling, but ultimately mundane story of a boy growing up.
And that at it's heart is what this story is about; nothing and everything.
Objectively you could walk away from this film and say 'nothing happened', there are no special effects, no great culmination or dramatic turns. It follows a family through the course of 12 years, through the small to large changes in living that influence the adults that emerge. It could easily have been entitled 'Childhood' such is the prominence of Mason's sister Sam, both come through the experience and we bear witness to how events in their lives shape the adults they become.
Like limpets on a ship, some moments in time can seem inconsequential but have lasting impact that cannot be rectified. Here we have a front row seat as the mother tries dutifully to sweep the hull of her ship clean from the effects of three failed marriages and countless new starts. Only when her nest is emptying does she come to realise the futility of it all, life happens to us not the other way around.
In similar fashion to the great American novels of John Updike, the Rabbitt series that charted the life of Harry Angstrom from 1950s US suburbia to the turn of the Millennium, here there is a great appreciation of time and space.
Just in the imagining of this concept Richard Linklater indulged his dreams as opposed to the hard nosed business of production. To come up with a filming schedule over twelve years, hoping beyond logic that all the child actors would wish to maintain their involvement through their entire adolescence, and to produce powerful scenes through every stage of their development is entirely unique.
The stamina and resolve required to prevent the seemingly inevitable imbalance of any aspect of the film over such a long period; acting, camerawork, costume, set, chemistry, emotion, pacing.
Knowing that each year you would return to the same project, and be able to deliver work that would stand alongside that from each year prior, is a sizeable demand on a cast and crew of varying degrees of talent and experience. It is huge credit to Linklater that this project held, and the end product is remarkable. A visual document of both a family, and of every family. Of specific happenings, and universal truths. Of the local and the global.
As in John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath where the narrative turns at alternate chapters through the specific story of Tom Joad's family with the general picture of Dustbowl existence, here we can recognise where this story becomes greater than Mason and Samantha and speaks for the experience of all children.
There are relevant and relatable moments in these lives for everyone. Everyone is born, everyone must survive, everyone must deal with the varying degrees of love and attention they receive. Everyone has a family of some description, and only over long periods of time can one come to recognise just how much power these people in our lives have over us. There is nothing we can do but be influenced by everything we encounter. Perhaps the transition from boy to man is recognising the power that exists to influence others, and recognising what can be exerted upon us.
It must have been tempting to end the film at the point of Mason's graduation, a true metaphorical moment where his boyhood has ended in pomp and ceremony, but much of the point here is that life is not wrapped in ribbons and bows. We are provided a snapshot that ends when it ends. We close our eyes and the story halts, we open them again and it starts once more.
Time unfolds before us through sheer persistence. It is a constant theme in everything that happens, because it is the one inescapable fact of all our lives. Time goes on. It stretches out in front of us and taunts us at various stages. When we want it to slow down it speeds us through periods we wish we could repeat over and over. When we are going through trauma it slows us down and enforces absolute consumption of events.
Robert Frost once said of life that he could sum it up in three words; 'It goes on'.
Those words are never said in this film, but it is demonstrated powerfully by the quick succession of events that tumble before our eyes. At almost three hours many might baulk at the length, but condensing 12 years into that period is an immense skill and thus the film does not dawdle along at any stage.
If there is one trick missed in this inspiring, moving and darkly funny film, it is that John Lennon's 'Beautiful Boy' does not feature in the soundtrack.
With the oft-recounted lyric of 'Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans' but also the more general floating lullaby of a doting John to his son Sean captures much of the distant but powerful love Mason senior has for Mason junior.
Indeed the perfect opportunity for such use, in an otherwise faultless soundtrack, comes when the father gives Mason a self-generated Beatles album of solo content by John, Paul, George and Ringo. The 'Black Album' brings the Beatles back together long after their split in 1970, a sentimental notion that could only come from a father who for long periods of the film is incapable of dealing with the reality of his family situation, and would rather apply a retrospective smudge on historical events as if the trauma never happened.
At points like this you don't know which is the adult and which is the child, Mason or his father. The father at points seems to long for his family to be back together, much like the Fab Four, before he starts a family of his own.
He later confides that he has finally become the 'castrated old fool' his first wife longed for him to be.
There is a certain feeling of correlation between Mason junior and senior. They come to moments of realisation in similar fashion, despite the fact one is the others father, they even get girlfriends at the same time.
A generation separates them but you could accuse Ethan Hawke of subtly stealing the boyhood from his son. We first encounter him in his absence, he is somewhere in Alaska unable to cope with being a father. He then surfaces in a GTO without seatbelts, offering presents, bowling and fries. Being fined by his pre-pubescent daughter for swearing is an interesting freudian reverse. But by stages and through to the end of this film, Mason senior feels comfortable in his own shoes.
As an experience in cinema, there are few similar offerings to Boyhood, and for that it is worth seeing.