Leave the World Behind (2023)

Everything is Disconnected ("Siri, What's This Movie About?....Siri?.........Siri?.....Do I Hear Chuckling?") 

 or

♪"Ain't That a Shaymalan?"♫

 

I just got a new cell-phone. A smart-phone. I'd had a "dumb-phone" before...for like 15 years—can't be that dumb if it's lasted for 15 years, can it? Very dependable. Always worked. Made phone calls. Text. The occasional picture. But, now a year in to smart-phone land, I find myself depending on it more...more time spent on this one than the last one. Too much time, really. I'm at that stage of life where I really shouldn't be wasting the amount of time I have left.

And I do it anyway ("idiot").

And I've been quite amazed on how much I depend on this phone for features that I quite happily lived without for so many years. And how much everything is now so tied up together with the phone, my car, my bank, my messaging...everything. And it scares the crap out of me. What happens when they don't work? Will I be able to go back to "analog mode" in order to get things done? Probably...it will just take more time (hopefully).

So, along comes Leave the World Behind—this year's end-of-year doom-and-gloom Netflix release (last year's was White Noise and the previous year Don't Look Up)--based on the 2020 best-seller by Rumaan Alam, and written and directed by Sam Esmail (creator of the cult series "Mr. Robot"). In it, a New York couple, the Sandfords, Amanda (Julia Roberts) and Clay (Ethan Hawke)--they have two kids, Archie (Charlie Evans) and Rose (Farrah Mackenzie)--rent an Airbnb for a short vacation out of the city...to Long Island. Amanda's a bit "prickly" from her work (advertising, natch) and Clay's work as a media studies professor is stressing him out, so the "vacay" is spontaneous and short, much like Amanda. 

And it's fine...a very neat well-designed house...with a pool...close to a beach. Then things get weird. An oil tanker heads right for the shore without slowing and runs aground. Then, everybody's cell phone goes out. Radio stations stop broadcasting. Computers work but can't connect to the internet, so they're a bit isolated for news. The place is still nice, and they're provisioned if they have to stay longer. Sit and wait. That's the best thing to do given any lack of evidence.

Until there's a knock on the door late at night. It's the house's owner, G.H. Scott (Mahershala Ali) and his daughter Ruth (Myha'la), dressed to the 10's after an evening at the symphony in New York. They've shown up at the doorstep because New York is in the middle of a blackout and they've come to their Long Island retreat for safe haven from the craziness the blackout has created. Amanda is suspicious—they could be anybody—but Scott has keys to the liquor cabinet and knows the email address Amanda contacted to get the place, and he even offers a bit of a refund for the inconvenience of sharing the place overnight. Some haggling and repercussions are interrupted by a notice that comes over the TV announcing that all stations have ceased functioning due to a national emergency. Reluctantly, Amanda agrees with Clay to let them stay...but there are questions. And nobody has any answers.

Some come through in the morning—Amanda awakes to some brief alerts on her phone's news-feed. The U.S. is paralyzed by a massive nationwide hacking attack on U.S. systems that have darkened New York and interfered with broadcast and navigation systems. But, more things have happened and continue to happen—there are distant explosions and a crippling sonic attack that shatters windows and deafen inhabitants. Wildlife is acting strangely—deer appear out of nowhere and the house pool is invaded by flamingos. Visiting a neighbor's home to commandeer a satellite phone, Scott finds that it doesn't work, indicating that U.S. satellite systems have been compromised. Drones drop leaflets that translate to "Death to America" and airplanes start to drop from the sky.

The Sandfords attempt to leave the island, but find the routes snarled by miles of Teslas drawn to the same spot by self-driving systems (interesting that this week Tesla has recalled models with that system; the publicity from the movie must not be good). Complications ensue and the Sandfords and Scotts must join forces to seek shelter as advised by Scott's contractor, a suvivalist (Kevin Bacon), who has prepared for the end-times.

It's a clever little conceit that plays on all sorts of modern fears of weak power grids, infrastructure lapses, "Havana syndrome," and hacker gangs and provides all the doom-scrolling you need for the modern world in one neat 2 hour package. That is if one can ignore the temptation of complacency and is paying attention. Snatches of "Special Reports" and recognition of this week's hole of fallibility go off in one's head as one keeps watching things for these people get worse and worse (the flamingos I've never seen covered on "60 Minutes", though) and it's all done for straight tension, not for any satiric purpose as in Don't Look Up.

It's aided and abetted by strong performers who are very good at playing "I have no idea what's going on but I'm not comfortable with it" and with a particular nod to Roberts for daring to risk her reputation as "America's sweetheart" with a performance that is flat-out vexing for its negativity and pure harridanism. One wonders how her character could function in the world of advertising with her ability to say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. Her results must vary.

One must also admire the direction of Esmail, who, as if the events in the teleplay weren't off-putting enough, manages to present them in such a disorienting fashion while still keeping you aware of who's where and what their relationship to their surroundings are. One should always be aware of directors calling attention to themselves with camera tricks, but Esmail does them in such a clever way that one follows fascinated to see what he's going to do with it, rather than merely dismissing his tricks with a dismissive "show-off" remark. He also employs a nifty editing scheme: like author Dan Brown's way of ending chapters just as things are getting interesting, Esmail will cut away to another sequence when there's a slight escalation in tension, then cut back once that situation starts getting busy, and continues to see-saw with ever-building tension until a viewer is ready to snap. I've been seeing a lot of dismissive comments saying that Leave the World Behind is boring; there is no way it could be with this editing scheme—maybe those commenters upped their daily medication.

I found it to be a compelling little slow-burn thriller of the M. Night Shyamalan school—every-day situations are up-ended by some weird phenomenon that then goes to great pains to try to explain it all away, however tortured that explanation may be. Here, the speculations seem a bit more plausible, even if they are horrific in scope. Toss in some Fincher-style transition tricks, and one is slowly pushed to the end of one's seat...with the occasional check to make sure your devices are still online.

Even moreso, it reminds one of one of the better "Twilight Zone" episodes from that series' first incarnation. Leave the World Behind is the "The Monsters Are Due on Marple Street" for the 21st Century, and the coming Trumpocalypse.

 

And it still works.

First Reformed

Suffering from Complications
or
A Letter to the Philistines from the Apostle Paul Schrader

There is a remarkable quality of the ascetic in Paul Schrader's new film, First Reformed, his latest film exploring religion—although you could make a case that everything he's done has had something to do with it, given the director's Calvinist upbringing. But, this one hits the hammered nail on the head and may be his most completely satisfying film he's ever made...although it may confound and frustrate an audience, be they of a religious bent or not. It's an unqualified and non-denominational success. And it's so simple...and so threadbare and low-budget ($3.5 million), it could almost be monk-like. 

Take the aspect ratio, for inescapable instance: First Reformed is shot in the Academy ratio of 1.375:1, that boxy shape that was abandoned in the 1950's for the more heretical widescreen formats designed to lure people out of their homes and away from their own flickering square TV screens. That shape is the shape of old movies and its breadth is so humble, it is practically orthodox.

Reverand Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke) is a former Army Chaplain, been most of his life. He was married. Not any more. When his son came of age, he wanted to join the Army and although his mother despised the idea, his Chaplain father didn't discourage it. Six months later, he was dead in Iraq. The marriage collapsed The reverend left the Forces and through a mega-church called Abundant Life, has become the pastor of an historic landmark in the town of Snowbridge, New York, the First Reformed, which was a way-station on the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves on their way to Canada. The church is a tourist attraction (with gift shop) and the congregation is spotty, at best.

"I'm going to keep a journal." he says at the beginning of the film. In that journal, he will pour he thoughts, his dreams, his disappointments—even in the writing—an act he seems as a form of communication, even a sort of prayer. At the end of the 12 months, he will shred it, and burn the shreds leaving no trace behind. Writing a journal (like writing a little-read blog) is a solitary, selfish act, but like any form of communication, it can clear the cob-webs, garner perspective, lay bread-crumbs, and even reveal perspective and truth. It can also mire you in a perpetual loop of self-reinforcement, much like the rabbit-hole Travis Bickle burrows into in one of Schrader's early scripts Taxi Driver. And like Bickle, the Rev. Toller is another of "God's Lonely" men of the writer-director's devising.

Toller is passive. His manner is open, but doesn't reveal much—perhaps because he doesn't have much to reveal that he doesn't channel through his journal. He certainly doesn't reveal much passion or zeal or fervor, and it's reflected by the low attendance at the church.

That changes when he's approached by Mary (naturally) (Amanda Seyfried) who is seeking counselling for her husband, named Michael (Philip Ettinger), not Joseph, who is an environmental activist. Mary is pregnant (naturally and presumably not immaculately) and Michael is encouraging her not to have the child—with the Earth beyond its sustainable tipping point, he is questioning the wisdom of bringing a child into this crumbling world (at the child's age of 50, current coastlines will be under two feet of water). "It's a little girl. What do you say when she looks into your eyes and says 'You knew about this all along.'"

Toller falls back on some yin/yang comparisons and calls upon the mystical—"Courage is the answer to despair. Reason has no answers."

Then, Michael hits him with the ultimate question: "Can God forgive us for what we've done to this world?"

Toller deflects: "Who can know the mind of God?"

"I felt like I was Jacob wrestling with the angels." he writes later. "It was exhilarating."

Exhilarating. That's got to be a charge for someone who's clinically depressed, and that's what Toller is—going through the motions, cutting himself off from people and differing perspectives, which just might show him a way out of his funk...if he was looking for it. But, when the person you grasp onto is also a depressive, and is, in fact, a suicidal depressive, the risk is to stay in your dark comfort zone, but also jump into another rabbit-hole, one that only seems new and different, but is also deeper. 

Did I say suicidal? Who said anything about suicide? Well, Toller gets a text from Michael—"Meet me at the park"—and when he gets there, Michael is dead, having blown his head off with a shotgun. Toller calls the police, and goes with them to inform Mary. Mary has previously seen that Michael had created a suicide vest and informed Toller, who took it away, where it was squirreled away in the garage, away from prying eyes. The discovery that it was missing may well have prompted Michael's final act. But, what was he going to do with it? It couldn't have been any good.

Toller follows the specifications of Michael's will—to proceed over his funeral, scattering his ashes at a toxic waste dump, a dump created by the town's chief business, a paper mill and chemical plant run by Edward Balq (Michael Gaston), who happens to be one of the biggest contributors to Abundant Life and is spear-heading the celebration of the First Reformed's 250th anniversary. A large event is planned with the governor, mayor, and Balq all in attendance, At a lunch meeting between Balq, Toller and Abundant Life's pastor, the Rev. Joel Jeffords (Cedric the Entertainer), Balq reads Toller the riot actor for making Michael's funeral a political act about climate change, which Toller defends as the man's wishes, which he knew because he was counselling him. "You counselled him and then he shot himself..." Balq barks back. "Well, I think before you criticize others, you should take a hard look at yourself, Reverend."

Toller does take a hard look, but at Michael's laptop and all the research Michael had done in his activism. And more and more, he starts to become obsessed.

So, you have a self-isolating man spirographing his own thoughts, you expose him to ideas that have just enough  intersection with his own, ideas that alarm him and touch him simultaneously, then you put in his hands a weapon and a target and you start the clock until it counts down. Schrader was editing First Reformed when he noticed how similar it was to his earlier Taxi Driver, but you don't have to have seen that film to connect the dots and see the fire on the horizon. As Toller's resolve crystallizes, he becomes distracted by Mary, who is still dealing with Michael's suicide.

At one point, in his spartanly furnished rectory, she mentions something she misses about Michael—they used to lie together, feet touching feet, hands touching hands, face to face, aware of each other's breath, heart-beat, pulse. When Toller agrees to do the ritual with her, it is non-sexual, but transcendant, like an out-of-body experience, floating above the floor, imagining flying over beautiful, pure vistas that gradually darken, become sullied and polluted. Talk about losing the moment.

You know how Taxi Driver ended (I assume)—with a bloody catharsis, that becomes misrepresented in the culture as a heroic act, when it was actually a murderous rampage born out of frustration for not having pulled off an assassination. First Reformed ramps up to just such a crisis-point, that is potentially horrifying. One starts to feel one's palms sweat the closer one gets to that Anniversary celebration, even as Toller begins to behave irrationally and starts to break. Oh Lord, here we go again.

But, Schrader, for whatever reason, does something different, staging a form of cinematic intervention that is not only inventive, but actually inspired, making your jaw drop. It's hard to imagine this word being used for a Paul Schrader film, but it's actually sublime, and apt, and, frankly, heaven-sent. It also points to a rejection of -ologies or -osity's, a breaking free and its own catharsis. First reformed is tight, focused, and concentrated, no less concerned with the struggles of the soul and the conscience as with other Schrader films. But, it's brevity, spartan nature and straight-forward narrative make it the best film Schrader has ever done.

And, just when the guy was about to quit making movies.

Imagine...

The Complex Art of Film Noir: Winter 2007

Written at the time of the films' releases. I still find it interesting that both these movies were released on the same day.

I: "Before The Devil Knows You're Dead"*

In Broad Daylight

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Just ask Andy and Hank Hanson. They both need money because they want to do right by their families: Andy, so he can get out of debt and maybe move with his depressed wife to Rio de Janeiro; Hank, because he's a few months late in child support, and he wants to do right by his daughter...oh, and his mistress, and ...well, all of Hank's dreams are short-term.

But Andy has a plan that's fool-proof: a robbery. "No one gets hurt. It's perfect." Trouble is, Hank's a fool, and he agrees before he knows all that it entails. Andrew, a real estate accountant, gives him a down-payment. "There's $2,000. See what that does for you. Imagine the rest."

They can't imagine. Because, as they say in the magazine-shows, things go "horribly, horribly wrong."

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead might belong to that sub-genre of comedy films called "The Incredible Mess," where seemingly simple plans go increasingly awry, but it's no comedy, except in the perverse way perfect disasters pile upon perfect disasters. 

I would contend, however, that the movie, as written by Kelly Masterson, is a film noir, that species of film where the world maliciously has it in for an honest man, and corruption runs so deep that it's manifested in a shade of fathomless blackness--"where the world is dark with something more than night," as the saying goes. One of the laureates of the proto-noir story was Raymond Chandler, who laid out the ground-rules for his brand of detective fiction in an essay titled "The Simple Art of Murder," first published in 1944, and quoted extensively below.** In it, he railed against the "drawing room" brand of detective fiction as weak and unrealistic, and that a detective-hero must try and find Truth in a fabric of deception, obfuscation, and agendas so thick it's like wading through a cess-pool. 

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is so steeped in layers of corruption that any transgression amplifies to the worst possible conclusion, and by chain reaction drags the innocent down as well as the guilty in a tragedy of Shakespearean consequences. No one is immune from the veil of evil. The world of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is so corrupt, there is no hero. And it all happens in broadest daylight.

There have been "daylight-noirs" before, like Gun-Crazy, and, of course, Chinatown, which takes place in sun-blasted L.A. But Devil is centered in New York, and mostly gentrified New York at that. New York, because the director is Sidney Lumet, who quite rarely makes a movie anywhere else. Lumet's an odd choice for a noir film, although he's made many films in The Big Apple's squalor—Serpico, The Pawnbroker, Prince of the City, Q & A, and he's made many movies that intertwine family and crime—Dog Day Afternoon, Murder on the Orient Express, and Family Business. As a director, he's not very stylish, and is, in fact, pretty clunky, as in Twelve Angry Men, and Fail-Safe, or, dare I mention it, The Wiz. Lumet expends his energy on performance, rather than construction. In fact, Lumet has rarely risen above his roots as a director of live television: a master shot, the occasional close-up, and that's about it. His camera work is utilitarian at its best, sometimes inelegant, brightly lit, nothing fancy. He tends to downplay using film scores (except as punctuation, however, when he wants mood, he will overdo it, as per Murder on the Orient Express), thinking them too pervasive and detracting from a scene's manufactured reality. When he does try something different (in other films, it was crudely distorting lenses) it's always in your face. Here, it's an editing transition that flashes forward and back three to four times, similar to the "druggy" transitions in Easy Rider, but with an annoying clacking noise at each edit. The story-telling technique employed is similar to that of another noir, Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, where the actual caper is viewed from one character's point of view, then rewinds back to another participant's during the same time period and beyond. The plot advances and coalesces in increments until the inevitable end-game where all stories come together. And Devil ends in the only way this noir-in-daylight could end.

Because it's Lumet, it's the performances where the movie shines: Philip Seymour Hoffman is all sweating self-pity as Andrew, Ethan Hawke is Hank, a pitiful train-wreck doing a poor job of trying to appear "together", Albert Finney goes a bit over the top as their father Charles, and Marisa Tomei shows the promise that her early Oscar win belied as Andrew's wife, caught in the middle. But the smaller performances of minor characters like Michael Shannon and Aleksa Palladino stand out as well. It's a blackly depressing film that owes whatever greatness it achieves to the writing and performances.

II: "Gone Baby Gone"

That, in All Things

Now, walk down these mean streets a little further--all the way to Boston. Here you'll find private detective Patrick Kenzie, the very definition of the term John D. MacDonald used to describe Raymond Chandler. "He writes," said MacDonald "like a slumming angel." Kenzie knows the back-alleys, the crack-dens, the gang-bangers, the dealers, the dive bars and the angles and he knows how to handle them with a cock-suredness that belies his years.*** But that street cred only takes you so far, because although he's lived in Boston his entire life, New Orleans transplant detective Remy Bressant (Ed Harris--extraordinarily good) tells him "I've been here longer than you've been alive."

And Bressant has seen the long continuous story of those places Kenzie merely visits. But if Bressant knows more, nobody tops Captain Doyle (Morgan Freeman, completely dominating the three scenes he's in), whose daughter was kidnapped and killed, and has dedicated his life to making sure it doesn't happen again on his watch. 4½ year old Amanda McCready has gone missing from the neglectful eye of her good-for-nothing mother and Kenzie and his partner Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) have been hired by an aunt to find her, however reluctant they are to take the case. Within 24 hours, there's a good chance they can find her alive and unharmed. She's been gone, now, for 60.

And soon, after all the slumming and the chance-taking, the compromises with the police and the stake-outs gone bad, the case comes to a dissatisfying end, and like any good noir dick, that's just not good enough for Kenzie. He has to keep pushing for Truth, no matter how hidden, no matter the consequences. But the Truth hurts and can lead to decisions made for the best of reasons but the worst of consequences. And this "slumming angel," this noir-hero by Chandler's precise description, will suffer the consequences for his decision, both personal and professional. But because he is the hero, he must fight that corruption even if the result is not a more perfect world, but the same tainted world as when he began. And maybe, even one that's worse.

As it happens, there is no moral high ground here. There is no "right" and "wrong" for the situation is too far out of control for there to be a "right" and a "wrong" and the two step over each other's line as often as a police tape is crossed. The resolution of the story, the choices made can be argued for days, and the last shot of the movie damns even as it takes the film to a logical conclusion.

This has been a great year for Casey Affleck. First, he stepped out of the star-crush to become more than a glorified extra in Ocean's 13, carried the bulk of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and now holds his own against Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris at the height of their powers. His performance in Gone Baby Gone shows great versatility and an amazing range. 

But if Casey's potential has come to fruition, the emergence of Ben Affleck as a director is nothing short of a revelation. Here he shows a command of time and place, and a wonderful eye for faces that lend authenticity to the grime of the surroundings. An action scene at night may not be as focused and suspenseful as it should be, but the rest of the movie is assured, and negotiates moral discussions without getting bogged down in high-handedness or slowing the movie down. That fine directorial touch extends all the way to the wickedly oblique final shot that will creep on you days after the fade to black. Given this auspicious debut, one looks forward to the next film featuring Ben Affleck behind the camera.

The view from 2016: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead was Sidney Lumet's last film; Gone Baby Gone was Ben Affleck's first. I still find Lumet's approach to making films limited and dispassionate. As a director, he is not subtle in how he shapes a film to get a reaction out of an audience with his invasive angles and choice of lenses. He is not so much a story-teller as a propagandist—and not in the sense of having a political leaning, although he had one, which has nothing to do with his film-making approach. Lumet makes directorial choices that does not let an audience make up its own mind...on anything. That technique approaches the dictatorial in how he presents—when Lumet makes a point, he makes it with all the subtlety of a brick through a window. In a way, I think Lumet has never trusted an audience. If he had, he might have played things a little looser, which might be why, when he's attempted a comedy, they've tended to fall flat.

Which is why the pairings of Gone Baby Gone and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is of such interesting coincidence. I'm not going to say that first-time director Ben Affleck is a better director than Sidney Lumet, but he sure does trust the audience more. He leaves you with such a complex moral dilemma that it generates more questions than answers. Lumet would never allow questions and would telegraph the answers. Lumet may generate outrage, but he doesn't generate thought (unless he's so obtuse, you wonder what his point was). Affleck, with this movie and his second film The Town**** (but not Argo, his crowd-pleasing Oscar-winner—that one's pretty cut-and-dried) did not telegraph easy answers or opinions. If anything, he left you hanging with ambiguity, wondering what came next. Starting out, at least, his movies seemed to indicate that they continued to have life after he shut off the camera. Affleck leaves you wanting more. Lumet says everything that he has to say.

Affleck has had the benefit of more hind-sight than Lumet and less time in the director's booth of TV. That's an advantage, and his movies feel less staged and less in a bubble-universe all their own than Lumet's.

I guess that this is an explanation that all these years later, that I think Affleck's first film is better than Lumet's last. Interesting.
 

Boyhood

Our Annual Family Reunion
or
"May the Circle Be Unbroken"

So, what has director Richard Linklater been doing the last twelve years? Well, he's been making mainstream movies (School of Rock, a remake of Bad News Bears) interesting indies (Me and Orson Welles, two of the "Before" movies with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy—Before Sunset and Before Midnight—and Bernie), even a dramatic knock-off of a documentary (Fast Food Nation). He also made A Scanner Darkly, an experimental low-budget animation, live-action hybrid of a Philip K. Dick story.

But in the background, he's been doing something even more ambitious—pushing the boundaries of cinema possibility—by transcending cinema-time—with an untitled project he's been filming in dribs and drabs every year, like a family reunion. Like Orson Welles (of whom he knows quite a bit), he'd film a little when he had the money, his cast able to assemble, and the germ of an idea for what to film.  

The idea is at once ambitious and as simple as could be—to film the interaction between children and parents over twelve years, from first bursts of independence to young adulthood. The result, finally titled Boyhood, is simultaneously an extraordinary idea for a film and a bit of a letdown as a film, probably because of the loosy-goosy nature of the story—when Linklater has a solid script, he rocks it; when he's being improvisational—well, he takes what he can get.

This idea of watching actors age naturally on-screen is hardly new—Francois Truffaut did several films in the Antoine Doinel series, and Satyajit Ray made the Apu trilogy over a series of years (Hell, we can even throw in the "Harry Potter" films for the amazing growing up we, as an audience, got to witness in the actors—the best thing about that series, actually).

The difference here is that Linklater does it in one 2 1/2 hour film and we see the changes those twelve years make quickly. In the space of an edit, another year has passed and the changes to the kids in the film (primarily Ellar Coltrane and Lorelei Linklater, the director's daughter, who plays Coltrane's sister) are profound, starting out subtly and then galumphing in large strides in their teen years. In the early sections of the film, you don't even know that time has passed until some indication that something has happened in the lives of the birth-parents (Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke...again).

And a lot happens. When we're first introduced to the already-gone-nuclear family, Mom is struggling singly with the kids and a whiny relationship with some guy, and Dad takes them on the occasional weekend, when he's down from Alaska (they're in Texas). The kids wonder if they're going to get back together, but it's not going to happen—they married as kids and quickly grew apart, as she thinks about family and he (being male) thinks about himself. She moves the brood to Houston to live with her Mom and to attend classes at the University.

She begins a relationship with one of her professors (Marco Perella), they marry and the two families blend, and without much difficulty. But the professor has a different way of raising kids than Mom does, and that leads to clashes and he begins drinking and abusing her. She and the kids escape to a friend's house, splitting the family apart.

Mason jr., prone to video games to escape

Mom begins teaching psychology at the University and becomes established, and begins dating one of her students—she doesn't learn anything at this University—and young Mason, now a teen, discovers girls...and drugs...and alcohol. Mom marries her student, and, once again, the cycle of alcohol abuse begins anew.

The incidents start small and become incrementally larger and life-changing. Dad marries a Christian woman and semi-cleans up his act. Mom gets out of another abusive relationship, as the kids grow older and start their own. While watching Boyhood, one gets the sense that nothing much is happening, as kids approach adulthood and their parents approach the realization of what their lives have amounted to. But, with the perspective of time, one sees the cyclical (and cynical) nature of life in broad strokes in the film—the incidents seem less important than the overall arc, the shape of it.  

And if that is the intent, then the film is best appreciated in the remembering than the experience. If Linklater did build the film to show the parallels of parent to child, of experience and folly handed down from generation to generation, then maybe it is saying something profound, about life and its nature, of how the generations learn from their parents and might be doomed to repeat the same cycles, despite trying to break free and achieve their own sense of independence, finding their own way—but not entirely, just doing things a bit differently—from the paths imprinted on them by their parents.

I can't say I enjoyed Boyhood. But it has stayed in my brain, a memory that only has achieved a profound resonance over time. Not too unlike life itself.