I don’t know who would ever be behind an attack on Boyhood. What I do know about people is this: it doesn’t take long for something that’s highly praised to be picked apart. “It isn’t really THAT good,” so the mantra goes. They said it about The Godfather, Schindler’s List, No Country for Old Men, Jaws, The Wizard of Oz – and they’re saying about Boyhood. The trouble is that the Oscar race is like a political election now and there are far too many meddlers getting their hands dirty in service of people who have vested interests, one way or another. Or maybe they secretly like to take the piss out of someone on their way up to the podium – we all know that trolls do it not because they feel they are right but because it feels so good to cause others pain.
Where this piece by Mary Jo Murphy actually reminds me of, though, is the famous quote by Rilke which essentially says that if you are not finding beauty in your own life – do not blame it. Blame yourself. Tell yourself you are not poet enough to call forth its riches. If she can’t see the story in Boyhood, if she can’t recognize the way it is the work of an artist, not the work of a documentarian, that’s fine. Does it really need to be a story in the New York Times the day that Oscar ballots are sailing into mailboxes?
I do not know who pulls the strings but I do know it is ten times worse now than it ever was when I started. Too many people desperate for traffic (not the New York Times of course), too many people indistinguishable from each other and with a news stream that travels like wildfire and eventually trickles down on Oscar voters. That is how it works in politics and how it works in the Oscar race.
Murphy seems upset or miffed that people love Boyhood but don’t lavish the same praise on Up. Well, you know why? Because Up is depressing as shit. It’s about how life comes to an end not with a bang but a whimper. It reminds us all that it passes in the most dull fashion imaginable. It’s interesting in the same way that watching your own face age in the mirror is interesting. That wasn’t what Linklater was doing. He wrote characters who moved through life pinging off various teachers who were there to interrupt the process or inspire him along the way. Each scene is deliberately executed to move the story forward – as the actors themselves age that merely adds more context to the story that’s there.
I have never admired the pettiness that seeps through these silly awards. It always reminds me of the last scene in The Maltese Falcon. All of that fighting over some worthless statue. What I got from Boyhood is far more valuable.
