Boyhood Is Still a Good Movie
We look back on an Even Better cornerstone, more than a decade after its release, to see how well it holds up.
Over here at Even Better, we have this recurring feature called 30 for 30, where we go through each of our 30 all-time favorite movies in our 30th year one by one. In honor of Carousel Month(s), we’ve flipped the script and are going 20 for 20 mode, by honoring our favorite film of 2014 in 2014. Has time been kind to it? Well, the headline might give up the game a little bit, but you’ll have to keep reading to find out just how kind it’s been.
20 for 20 — Boyhood
Elliott: If we had launched Even Better when we turned 20 instead of 30, it’s fair to say our list of favorite films would be a wee bit different. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood came into your and my lives 10 years ago, and the timing could not have been more perfect as a couple of 20 year old dudes who were ripe to enjoy it. What did this movie mean to you when you saw it 10 years ago?
Shawn: Oh man, nothing short of monumental, life-altering stuff. Coming of age at nearly the exact same pace as Mason in the movie, while hoisting up Richard Linklater’s career on a pedestal made it hard not to see this as a major culmination (not to mention nearly every critic and awards body marching in lockstep alongside guys like us).
As we now know, its reputation in cinephile circles would come crashing back down to earth, but I’m here to bravely say that Boyhood: still a pretty great movie here in 2024. The flaws were always there, if I chose to be a little more forgiving a decade prior — it wobbles slightly under the obligatory dramatic weightiness (almost everything involving Mason’s carousel of bad stepdads). But this is still such a triumph in editing and naturalist hangout cinema. In the age of de-aging technology, the steady accumulation of these small moments, changing haircuts, and temporal signposts still feels like little else.
Elliott: When you’re 20 years old as we were when it dropped, there are few things more impactful in art than resonance. You could argue that's the case regardless of your age, but never more so than in the formative years. Resonance doesn’t necessarily equal greatness, but it was a huge reason why Boyhood immediately felt like one of the best movies I’d ever seen. I felt like the Rick Dalton meme, pointing at the screen at all the things I recognized and that felt like Me. There’s a scene where a 13-year-old Mason is sitting in his room and “Let it Die” by Foo Fighters is playing in the background. I would listen to the same song at the same age in my room. I sat in the theater thinking, holy shit, somebody is making a movie about my life!
But it was more than the “thinking about shit that i Recognize and smiling” Dril tweet. It was watching the accretion of these mundane moments subtly converge into, as Mason and a gal under the influence of pot brownies posit the film’s thesis in its final moments, “the moment seizes you”, and “it’s always right now.” Simple, but damn did it connect with me as somebody that recently exited their own boyhood, already looking back and considering the moments that had shaped me, while also wondering, where on earth did the time go?
Shawn: With a decade’s worth of distance, this watch was especially about wondering where all the time went, while realizing we’re basically equidistant to Mason and Mason Sr. in age (and relating an unbelievable degree to Ethan Hawke’s entire deal here). Watching him detail Roger Clemens’ late-career renaissance in Houston to the kids, followed by Mason asking, “Dad, do you have a job?” shall we say, “hits different” in my year of baseball and nagging (un)deremployment.
But yeah, if Parenthood wasn’t already taken for a movie title, you could just as easily apply it to how Mason’s parents grow up right alongside him through the years. Patricia Arquette’s Olivia is given the more robust dramatic arc — and resonant payoff in her “I just thought there would be more” final, Oscar clip-minted scene. But there’s also the slacker dad’s gradual capitulation to society, giving up on the longshot music dreams to sell out and wear fleeces. Linklater extends such humanity to them in these scenes of navigating two very different parenting styles, and eventually reaching a quiet armistice through the years.
I want to talk about Mason though. As a character, he’s maybe a blank cipher for the median (white, dude) American who becomes annoying in the way most teenagers do who start thinking about the dangers of everyone staring at their phones (while opting out of regular social convention themselves). But I think a lot of the warts to Mason’s personality are fairly forgivable and important to the whole, as much as the period signifiers that tickled us so much at 20. That’s kind of just how teens (and Richard Linklater characters) are. How did Mason as a character and I guess, the movie more generally, register differently to you this time around?
Elliott: I quickly want to call out the thing that made me most nostalgic watching Boyhood in 2024, and that was for a time when the Astros were in the National League and not the same division as the Mariners.
But I’m glad you’re asking about Mason because I had a different experience with our guy this time. His adolescent ramblings about people living their lives through screens and his desire for “real experiences” were resonant when I was 20 because those things were heavy on my mind too. I’m sure I was ranting about those same topics (sorry to all who were listening). While perhaps an accurate portrayal of teenagehood, I felt less connection to Mason this time. Cipher is the right word. I don’t think Coltrane is that compelling of a performer as they get older, and some of Linklater’s writing, which often went straight to my heart in my early 20s, doesn’t connect with me as much. To be honest, watching the film again was a pretty existential experience. Not in a bad way at all; I just got pretty caught up in thinking about the ways I’ve changed in the last 10 years. I’m still unpacking some of that.
I still have a great admiration for the film, and an eternal gratitude for what it meant to a younger Elliott. It’s kind of in a group with movies like Her and Lost in Translation. Absolute canon for 20-year-old me that made me feel seen. I don’t resonate with them as much today, and that’s okay. But perhaps I’m putting too much stake in resonance. Where my appreciation for it deepened is what you were saying earlier Shawn about parenthood. The delicacy of Hawke and Arquette’s performances; specifically the bitter and poignant ending for Arquette, hit me like a truck. This question of “is this all there is?” Maybe I’ll watch that scene when I’m 50 and it’ll be a masterpiece again.