Boyhood at 10: I Don’t Want to Be Your Hero

I Don’t Want to Be Your Hero: Boyhood at 10

Celebrating the 10th anniversary of Boyhood is a prospect directly tied into the film’s baked-in meditation on the progression of time. Director Richard Linklater’s acclaimed, nearly three-hour opus documenting the adolescent growth of a young boy named Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) was highly publicized at the time of release for its singular method of production: Ellar and the rest of the cast literally age before our eyes, having agreed to annually gather to shoot the film over the course of 12 years. It gives Boyhood, especially the segments shot toward the beginning of the project, an aura of a living, wistful, nostalgic artifact, as we see not just Mason grow over the course of more than a decade, but the world around him as well, into the one we also occupied back in 2014. Now, in 2024, the final glimpse we have of Mason—slightly high and sitting atop a hill with a girl he’s just met at Big Bend Ranch State Park, staring off at the mountainous peaks at sunset just before his first semester of college—is an artifact as well.

Boyhood insists that you recognize some aspect of your life within the grand scope of its everydayness, something that works to unlock a sense of poignant emotional truth within yourself, borne of its coming-of-age narrative. In that sense, it is a film that shifts and changes between each viewing, as one’s perspective on their life matures. I’m not the same person I was when I saw the final moments of Boyhood at 16 in a small arthouse theater in San Antonio with my mom. I don’t live in San Antonio anymore. That arthouse theater shut down years ago. In stitching an epic tapestry defined by the mundane, the ordinary and the developmental, Boyhood’s slice-of-life milieu becomes a more all-encompassing document of the inevitable passage of time, a concept that becomes inextricable from how you respond to the film. It’s an ever-evolving looking glass of memories.

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That same artifact-type quality is what generates the small, novel rush of seeing archival performances from the film’s biggest stars. Ethan Hawke stars as Mason Sr., entering the film around 2004, when we as an audience still recognize him as the mid-30s, pining, impassioned author from Before Sunset, the middle chapter of Linklater’s other major experiment with the flow of time. Over 160 minutes, he gradually morphs into the Hawke of Before Midnight, with a decade of added experience as an actor, and who himself is now a man of the past. But the flow of time in Boyhood has a distinctly different effect than the nine-year check-ins of the Before films. As opposed to aging with the characters, we see entire lives as a collage right before our eyes, defined by a patchwork of commonplace moments. As Hawke himself said about the film, it’s like “time-lapse photography of a human being.”

This methodology makes for distinct results when defining and developing these characters. You get a similar nostalgic effect seeing the performance of Patricia Arquette as Mason’s mother Olivia, serving as he and his sister Samantha’s (Lorelei Linklater) primary guardian, whereas Mason Sr. embodies the archetype of the father picking up the kids every other weekend in an effort to be more involved with their lives. In perpetually flashing forward through time, stopping for just small detours of what each year holds for them as parents, you are encouraged to fill in some of the extraneous gaps yourself. Mason Sr. morphs into the cool, free-spirited father while simultaneously maturing enough to foster a budding new family, but he also doesn’t bear the burden of responsibility of his kids day in and day out. That falls to Olivia. She can be painted as a stern mother just as often as an understanding and nurturing one, subject to the tolls of parenting as she attempts to create a better life for her kids while also being subject to additional failed marriages due to the unyielding alcoholism of her successive husbands. The nuances of these dynamics threaten to become lost within the snapshot-style edit, but the full picture is always within reach.

The details of the characters were also informed by real life, further heightening the quasi-docufiction angle the concept takes on. Linklater began production in 2002 with a half-completed script that charted the general trajectory of each character, and apparently included the ending. But he would work with his actors to fill in the blanks as the years wore on and the actors developed into different roles in their lives. A common criticism thrown at Boyhood is that Mason grows into a brooding, disaffected, artsy photography kid who banally philosophizes about the state of the world, but not only is some of Mason’s demeanor a reflection of who Coltrane had grown into as a real person, there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the film’s awareness that Mason can occasionally be insufferable and self-absorbed—he’s a teenager.

Moreover, he’s a teenager raised among the conservative values of manhood and Christianity prevalent in much of central Texas, a culture that Mason gradually starts to develop a certain friction against as he grows older. He has the type of extended family that gifts him a red-letter bible and a shotgun for his birthday. He begins to resist forces that he perceives as controlling and authoritative, whether that be an alcoholic step-dad who tells him to stop mumbling, a photography teacher who has to get on Mason’s ass to complete his assignments, or a manager at his restaurant job who chides him for not working quickly enough. Some of these influences are well-meaning, some less so, and Mason’s response to them is sometimes warranted, and sometimes not. But every interaction exists within the greater context of environmental conditioning.

Mason’s repudiation of authority is also likely a result of influence of his father’s staunch liberalism, a facet of Hawke’s character that is brought to the forefront as a result of Linklater’s foresight to populate sections of the film with references to major cultural events to help date passages of time. News footage of America’s invasion of Iraq following 9/11 plays on TV while Mason Sr. humorously tells his children that the best person to vote for is “anyone but Bush.” He enlists his kids to help pass out Obama/Biden signs leading up to the 2008 election, which results in another moment that develops Mason’s resistance to conformism: A right-winger with a Confederate flag on his house berates the kids for thinking he would be a “Barack Hussein Obama” supporter. Boyhood’s fictional narrative doubles as a time capsule of major events leading into the 2010s, many of which leave an imprint on Mason’s psyche.

But this is also true of the pop culture and technological ephemera that Linklater frequently showcases. The list is immense as the film deliberately makes a document of what was popular at any given time: playing split-screen Halo on an original Xbox; attending the midnight book release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; riding a Ripstik to “Crank That (Soulja Boy)”; watching the Will Ferrell “Landlord” Funny or Die sketch; boxing on Wii Sports. The film’s engagement with media and culture occasionally turns strangely prescient, like when Hawke and Coltrane riff about whether or not there will ever be another Star Wars movie—they decide there’s nothing worthwhile to explore after Return of the Jedi.

This combination of real-life archiving melded with a true-to-life fictional narrative is what gives Boyhood its special, pensive magic—a magic Linklater so often excels at. Like those in many of his other films, the characters in Boyhood are prone to introspective, philosophical musings that lead to declarative sound bites expressing the themes Linklater is exploring: “Life doesn’t give you bumpers,” “I just thought there would be more,” “The moment seizes us.” In lesser hands, these proclamations might come off as cheap signposts signaling a film that desperately wants to be important. In Linklater’s hands, they feel like the truth.

Trace Sauveur is a writer based in Austin, TX, where he primarily contributes to The Austin Chronicle. He loves David Lynch, John Carpenter, the Fast & Furious movies, and all the same bands he listened to in high school. He is @tracesauveur on Twitter where you can allow his thoughts to contaminate your feed.

I Don’t Want to Be Your Hero: Boyhood at 10