Living through 2020 has taught me two things – to appreciate what we have and that keeping track of time is a fool’s errand. There are moments throughout the year that stay clear, while many others are fuzzy. Even as I approach the tenth anniversary of finally leaving high school, I am mentally revisiting who I was and who I am now. When looking back, I don’t recognize the person I once was. I realized there are moments bright as day, and others I barely recall. The mundane is blurry – snoozing my alarm so much I am late, getting to school, listening to lectures – but I do remember the fights in the hallways, the arguments with teachers, the breakups, the make-ups, failing and passing, meeting friends for the first time. Few films capture memory working in moments in such ways as Richard Linklater’s experiment of a film, Boyhood, and Greta Gerwig’s phenomenal debut feature, Lady Bird.
Some filmmakers have revisited their own characters across time, allowing us to witness how they adapt and grow. This occurs most famously in Linklater’s own Before Trilogy, but also in Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel saga, which feels like a huge inspiration for Linklater’s career. Starting with his own debut, Les Quatre Cents Coups, Truffaut would later revisit Doinel as he grew up and lived his life. Showcasing all of his ups and downs and never shying away from the harsh realities of life, Linklater’s Boyhood is a further extension of his love (or obsession) with time. Just like Truffaut, Linklater’s oeuvre is defined by time and how it changes us.
With Boyhood, Linklater doubled down on making his audience watch a character grow before our eyes. While one may watch sitcoms and see their favorite child actor become an adult or mature in front of their eyes, this phenomenon has never been played in such a fast forward that it transpires in under three hours. The film begins in 2001 with a six-year-old Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) and ends in 2013 as Mason turns 18 and leaves his house to go to college. As Mason (and Ellar, as the rest of the cast) grows right before our very eyes, the years pass us by. We are provided with songs, phrases, and other cultural signifiers to help the audience understand what year we’re in.
We are given the highlight reel of Mason’s life, moments that he would remember as he looks back. They’re specific moments, like hearing The Hives at the beginning of the film in 2001 or hanging out with friends as they play with saws and try beer for the first time. During the latter scene, I remember everyone being anxious anticipating for something to go wrong, yet nothing does. One wonders why the scene was included if nothing truly happens other than teenagers being teenagers, bragging about all the sex they aren’t having. This goes with how the film is dealing in moments, and that includes moments that have no effect on the overall plot. Boyhood is edited as if you were Mason at the end of the film, looking back at where you came from and how you got there. It plays like a dream sequence at times, very free-flowing with a massive lack of plot. This isn’t always a bad thing, and it works well in the context of the film. Some films need a proper outline and series of events that are meant to close character arcs, but when a film is designed to mimic life – these arcs are rarely as clearly defined as they’re allowed to be in cinema. Real-life is much messier, inhabiting grey areas instead of providing us with any definite answers.
As the film progresses, it seems apparent that Mason, Olivia (Patricia Arquette), Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), and Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) all have their own lives. Richard Linklater and the cast clearly filled in the gaps, and even though they don’t inform us of everything that they went through from one year to the next, it’s all implied. When watching your favorite TV show at the beginning of a season, a few months have passed, and you’re left filling in the blanks on your own. This is what the film feels like at times. It keeps you on your toes, anticipating what will happen next. It’s almost as if you’re retracing your steps. Whether it’s something as insignificant as trying to remember what you had for breakfast earlier that day or trying to remember where you left your wallet after spending all day at the mall Christmas shopping, Boyhood shows us both the gaps we’re trying to remember, while also showing us the milestones that are hard to forget.
On the other end of the spectrum, Gerwig’s Lady Bird is a film specifically about a very important moment in the protagonist’s life: the year leading up to her leaving home and going to college. Lady Bird is very much about the plot – about the fights she has with her mother, her best friend, and eventual boyfriends. More importantly, it’s about how Christine (Saoirse Ronan) – who spends most of the year fighting her birth name and wanting to be called Lady Bird – has slowly found out who she is.
The moments in Lady Bird feel far more specific and crucial to who she’s going to become as she grows older. These moments pack a punch and hold a lasting effect that makes you think of the scene even as we move on to the next one. The scene in which Lady Bird forgives Danny (Lucas Hedges) is still as beautiful to watch as the first time. At first, she’s rightfully upset at the fact that her boyfriend cheated on her and lied to her. However, when Danny opens up and asks her not to out him because he’s scared of how his family may react, you can see in Ronan’s incredible performance as she lets go of all her anger and understands. This moment isn’t Lady Bird’s, it’s Danny’s, and, while it hurts her, Danny will forever cherish that hug. Lady Bird might not fully understand what this moment means to Danny. To her, it’s her forgiving her first boyfriend while moving on and putting him in the rearview mirror.
There’s also the recurring joke of Lady Bird writing Danny’s name on her wall, before crossing it off to write Kyle’s (Timothée Chalamet) after they meet and begin their flirtation. Again, we see some moments of their relationship together – like when she loses her virginity. These are all moments that she thinks might define her or change her as a person moving forward – and sure, to some degree, that is true, but on the larger scale, all it does is prove that these milestones are only really milestones because those who came before us held them in high regard. The only thing that changes after her first time, or anybody’s first time, is you have to start awkwardly checking off “sexually active.” Growing up, either moving on from one partner to the next, it could feel as simple as crossing somebody’s name off the wall. While yes, painful, eventually the pain goes away as if it were just a light switch turned on. Our memory of the pain caused by past partners or break-ups becomes a distant memory, but you remember the highlights.
To this day, I can recite Lady Bird’s monologue at the end of the film word for word. She spends the duration of the film knowing she wants to leave Sacramento. When she finally does, she looks for a church – just the tiniest thing to remind her of home. She calls her mother to apologize, but to also talk about the things we take for granted. In this case, it’s driving around Sacramento and how she felt emotional the first time she did. “All those bends I’ve known my whole life, and stores, and the whole thing.” The transition period we witnessed is something Christine will hold dear to her heart and, though she may not remember it all, she’ll remember the moments that defined her and her friends, her family. Growing up, I was always a homebody. I stuck to myself and didn’t have friends I would talk to outside of school, outside of MSN Messenger. But, the summer before grade 9, I finally moved closer to my friends and we spent most of our summer outdoors, hanging out, talking gossip, and other unnecessary things that felt super important at the time. Without any help from alcohol or drugs, we would hang out from 3 in the afternoon ‘til midnight, and some days even later. A night ended with us in a park singing along to The Taste of Ink by The Used, solely because the lyrics are “it’s four o’clock in the fucking morning” and it was in fact, about to be four in the morning.
There’s something special about our transitional periods in life. Whether that be going from elementary/middle school to high school or, as showcased in Lady Bird, leaving high school for college, it feels as if you’re crossing off a lot of firsts on a list of neverending milestones. While years apart, Lady Bird reminds me of that summer before I went to high school, and how I knew when school started, life wouldn’t be the same. That change feels minuscule in retrospect, but at that time, the gap was massive.
Both Boyhood and Lady Bird are coming of age films that tackle some very important moments as well as random scenes their characters will always wonder why they remember so clearly as they grow, mature, and enter adulthood. Where they go next isn’t crucial to the audience or even themselves, but where they are in their own current moment of having their first taste of freedom after leaving their homes is. The audience sits back and watches these characters make mistakes and fall in love. Sometimes, we remember the exact moment that we want to go home and cross our ex’s name off the wall to have them replaced with someone new we just met, and other times it feels like we’ve just always been in love. I believe I understand Linklater’s personal obsession with time, why it’s a big theme for many filmmakers and storytellers, and that’s because we know that time is so finite yet feels neverending. Whether you’re six years old waiting for your birthday that just won’t arrive or you’re living through a pandemic and the beginning of lockdown feels like yesterday, time is hard to grab hold onto. Looking forward or backward can make you sad, happy, excited, or nervous.
While writing this, a childhood friend reached out to me and brought up how I used to burn CDs of some of my favorite songs to give to him. As much as I’ve tried, I can’t remember doing so – but I used to burn CDs like it was nobody’s business, so I believe that I might have. Sometimes we remember things so clearly, and sometimes it’s a distant memory that we can’t believe happened to us. That’s why Boyhood and Lady Bird are pitch-perfect in their representations of how our memory works. Sometimes the things we do can get lost in the tracks and the things we remember might not even be that important in the long run to us, but could mean everything to someone else. What a joy it would be to remember all the things that I’ve forgotten, but my friends never have.
