The Hip Pocket #23: BOYHOOD

An updated version of a favorite review

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

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Boyhood
Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Elijah Smith, Lorelei Linklater, Steven Chester Prince, Bonnie Cross, Sydney Orta, Libby Villari, Ethan Hawke, Marco Perella, Jamie Howard, Andrew Villareal, Shane Graham, Tess Allen, Ryan Power, Sharee Fowler, Mark Finn, Charlie Sexton, Byron Jenkins, Holly Moore, David Blackwell, Barbara Chisholm, Matthew Martinez-Arndt, Cassidy Johnson, Cambell Westmoreland, Jennifer Griffin, Garry Peters, Merrilee McCommas, Tamara Jolaine, Jordan Howard, Andrew Bunten, Tyler Strother, Evie Thompson, Brad Hawkins, Savannah Welch, Mika Odom, Sinjin Venegas, Nick Krause, Derek Chase Hickey, Angela Rawna, Megan Devine, Jenni Tooley, Landon Collier, Roland Ruiz, Richard Andrew Jones, Karen Jones, Gordon Friday, Tom McTigue, Sam Dillon, Martel Summers, David Clark, Zoe Graham, Jessie Tilton, Richard Robichaux, Will Harris, Indica Shaw, Bruce Salmon, Wayne Sutton, Joe Sundell, Sean Tracey, Ben Hodges, Daniel Zeh, Chris Doubek, Andrea McKinnon, Mona Lee Fultz, Bill Wise, Alina Linklater, Charlotte Linklater, Genevieve Kinney, Elijah Ford, Kyle Crusham, Conrad Choucroun, Maximillian McNamara, Taylor Weaver, Jessi Mechler
cinematography by Lee Daniel and Shane F. Kelly
editing by Sandra Adair
written by Richard Linklater
produced by Richard Linklater, Jonathan Sehring, John Sloss, and Cathleen Sutherland
directed by Richard Linklater
Rated R
2 hrs 45 mins
originally published in another form on HitFix

I am nine years old. I am lying in the back of the 1977 Plymouth van my parents are driving. It is the middle of the night, and we are leaving Dunedin on the first leg of our move to Texas. I am crying. My best friend Oli, my next-door neighbor, said goodbye to me earlier in the day, and we’ve made promises to write and call on the phone, but I know that I am leaving behind the life that I’ve enjoyed up to that point and that whatever comes next, it will be different, and I am afraid, and I am sad, and I am sure that nothing will ever be this good again.

I am twenty-six years old. I am sitting on the bed in the room I share with the woman I am about to marry, and she has just told me that she is leaving. I am yelling at her, but I can’t hear myself. I’m thinking about all the plans, all the conversations, all the promises, and I am thinking about the child we almost had, the choice that was made, the horrible space it left between us that nothing has worked to fill. I am crippled by both the love I have for her and the yawning suspicion that I really am a terrible person, not worth the love she’s wasted on me, and I know that if she leaves, I’m done, there’s no way I ever find anyone else, and I am sure that nothing will ever be this good again.

I am forty-four years old. I am sitting on the couch in the playroom of the house I bought. It is just after ten in the morning, and my kids are staring at me with wide eyes because I have just told them that I am moving out. I am numb. These two trusting, sweet souls have just been presented with the first genuine pain in their lives, and I am the cause of it. The life that they’ve lived until this moment is over and now we’re going to become a former family, a divided home, and the relationship I’ve had with the boys, that nightly closeness that we’ve known their whole lives now sacrificed in favor of some hope that we might find individual happiness where we could not as a couple, and I am sure that nothing will ever be this good again.