I attended a press screening of “Boyhood” last Monday, which was followed by a live panel discussion with the director, Richard Linklater, and three of the main actors: Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, and Ellar Coltrane—the young man who played the boy in question. The film has a lot of buzz, good will, and great reviews behind it—and it’s all but certain to receive a bunch of Oscar nominations, especially after having just garnered three Golden Globe Awards for Best Motion Picture (Drama), Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress (for Arquette) on Sunday night. Like many others, I found the movie to be full of riveting moments of family life and growing up, but I actually don’t need to insert a spoiler alert here to tell you about my favorite “Boyhood” moment because it happened after the screening I attended, something Hawke said during the panel discussion.
“Boyhood,” if you haven’t heard, took an approach to capturing the arc of childhood in a way that has never been done before in film: It was shot over a 12-year period, in which Coltrane himself (like his character) grew up. So viewers have the remarkable experience of watching him, and all the other actors, age naturally over time—instead of the more typical approach of having two or three actors play the boy at different stages of his young life. But to accomplish this, Linklater and the actors committed to gather once a year to make the next installment, a testament to their belief in the project.
I’m a movie fan but I’m not an aficionado. So I’ve seen a number of Hawke’s most popular movies over the years—and I know that he was married to Uma Thurman—but coming into the screening and the panel I didn’t really have any kind of feel for him as a person and I also hadn’t seen him act in a while. I also purposely skipped reading the reviews but I knew what the movie was generally about, and if I had any expectations, I think they were mostly about seeing Coltrane’s transformation over time and seeing Arquette (who I loved in HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire”). They both were great, but for me, it was Hawke’s performance as a loving, but unreliable, father that was the unexpected revelation.
And then came his performance in the panel. He loved making this movie, they all did, in the most personal ways. And what he essentially said—and I’m just going by memory—is that it gave him a chance to pour one of the most important experience of his life, being a dad, into his day job, in a way that he never can do in melodramatic action movies, or in any movie, really. Again, I worry about how I’m mangling this, but I feel like the essence of what he conveyed was his pride and pleasure in being able to contribute to a story that allowed him to call up this treasure of special knowledge and feelings that he’s gained as a dad.
And I thought, that’s exactly how I feel about my job. But I also thought, really, it’s a sentiment we all can relate to: In exchange for our love and commitment, the gift to parents is the experience of these incredible feelings–sublime joys, sacrifices, hopes, anxieties, love, tragedy, pride, intimacy, connection — and knowledge.
It’s Hawke’s gift to us — ditto for Linklater and Arquette — to put it all out there. But we can relate. In fact, even if we don’t we have a public stage, we get to share with each other.
Eric Messinger is the editor of New York Family. He can be reached at emessinger@manhattanmedia.com.
