The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Richard Linklater · a film · 2014 · 165 minutes · shot a few days at a time from 2002 to 2013, with one cast · in English
Mode
Domestic chronicle made over twelve years of production; the coming-of-age story told as the passing of time rather than as a plot
Mythos
The growth of a boy into a man, without initiation or ordeal; an inheritance handed down from a father; a departure west into the desert
Phase
About twelve yearly segments, Mason from about six to eighteen, from a house in Houston to a college town in West Texas and the desert at Big Bend
Presentation
Feature film in colour, 35mm, 1.85:1, 165 minutes, in English; four principal players aged on screen; no composed score, period songs in its place
Register
Level and plain, talk in cars, kitchens and back yards; rising at a few places, a dinner of dread, a mother at a table, light on rock
Scale
One boy, three households, a mother’s working life, twelve years of a country
Governing Proposition
A boy grows from about six to eighteen, played by one actor filmed a little each year for twelve years, with his sister, his mother and his father aged beside him, and the cut from one year to the next is never announced. The wager of the film is that a life is lived in the intervals the stories skip, that the milestones, when they come, do not feel like the life, and that time itself, shown on faces and bodies, can be the material of a fiction.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film was made a few days at a time, every year from 2002 to 2013, with the same four principal players. Ellar Coltrane plays Mason, from about six to eighteen. Lorelei Linklater plays his sister Samantha, a little older. Patricia Arquette plays their mother, Olivia, and Ethan Hawke their father, who lives apart from them and comes back into their lives by visits. Nobody is aged with makeup and no part is recast. What the camera records each year is what twelve months have done to four people.
The film begins with Mason as a small boy, and from there it moves forward without announcement. There are no titles giving the year, no fades, no change of film stock to mark the seams. A boy in one shot is a slightly older boy in the next, and for a while the viewer is not sure whether the cut has crossed a day or a year. Then the rule becomes clear, and from that point every cut is watched for it: a haircut, a voice lower than it was, a new house, a phone of a different colour.
The form is the argument. A story of growing up would choose its milestones and build toward them. This film takes about twelve segments of roughly equal weight and lets each run at its own pace, and the milestones, when they come, sit in the middle of ordinary days and pass without emphasis. What is left over is the material most films cut: the drive, the yard, the kitchen, the talk on the way to somewhere else. The film’s wager is that the life is there.
Movement II
Olivia goes back to school, and she marries Bill, a professor, who has children of his own. For a time the two families make one household. Then Bill drinks, and the household turns. The film plays the turn at a dinner table, in a bright kitchen: glass, threat, and the children frozen in their places. It is the first summit of the film, and it is a summit of dread.
The escape is fast. Olivia takes her children, and with one cut they are gone from the house. Bill’s children, who had been Mason’s and Samantha’s brother and sister for some years, are left behind and are never seen again. The film does not go back for them and does not say what became of them. They leave the film the way people leave a child’s life, without explanation and without return, and the film’s refusal to resolve them is its law stated for the first time.
The pattern repeats. Later Olivia marries again, a veteran of Iraq, and he too drinks, and the household again goes cold around him. The film does not make a thesis of it, but the cycle is plain: men who drink, and women who leave, taking the children with them into the next rented house. Bill’s household is staged closer to melodrama than anything else in the film, and the second marriage is sketched more lightly, but between them they give the mother’s story its spine.
Movement III
The father arrives in a GTO, and he has promised it to Mason. He is the parent who visits, loose and charming, and Hawke plays him so. He hands down what he has, and the clearest inheritance is a mixtape of the Beatles’ songs from after the band, the solo records, put together for his son: a father’s idea of what a boy should know, given as music.
Years pass between the cuts, and the father changes slowly into the man he did not mean to be. The GTO is sold. In its place is a minivan. The film plays the change as comedy rather than loss, and it is the comic reverse of Olivia’s story: the free man who settles turns out to be happier for it, and the promise he broke was the price.
At a fifteenth birthday in East Texas, with step-grandparents, the old rites of a family come out: a church, gifts, a welcome for a boy who is becoming a man. The film plays them for comedy and affection at once and does not mock them. It is the nearest the film comes to an initiation, and it is only a birthday. Through these years Mason grows quieter. He works in a restaurant kitchen, is lectured by a photography teacher, and is mostly a witness to the lives around him.
Movement IV
Olivia has done what she set out to do. She has studied, taught, raised two children through two bad marriages, and become a professor. On the day Mason packs for college she sits at the kitchen table and breaks down. Everything she worked toward has arrived, and she sees that what it has brought her is the passing of her life: the marriages, the children, the degrees, and, in her own account of it, nothing left ahead but her own funeral. It is the strongest scene in the film, and it belongs to the mother.
The scene is the film’s disclosure in one place. The milestones are all present, the son grown, the departure under way, and none of them feels like the life. What Olivia mourns is not the milestone but the run of ordinary days the film has spent its length on, and which are now over. Arquette plays it plainly, without lift, and the twelve years the viewer has watched her are what give it weight. The film’s fullest person is not its title figure.
There are weaker scenes in the last third, and the film carries them. Mason gives speeches about technology and freedom that turn talk into statement. The adults offer advice. In a restaurant, a plumber Olivia once encouraged comes to thank her years later, a circle closed too neatly for a film whose law is that circles do not close. Coltrane’s playing in these years is flat, and the film rests on him. These are the costs, and the film is large enough to bear them.
Movement V
Mason goes west to college at Sul Ross, in Alpine, and the landscape opens for the first time. The towns and suburbs of the earlier years give way to desert. He goes out with new friends to Big Bend, and the film, which has kept to cars, kitchens and back yards for nearly three hours, holds a landscape for its beauty: light on rock, wide country, a young man and a young woman sitting together in it.
They talk about the moment, and she says that it is “always right now”. It is the film’s one statement of its law, given late and lightly, by a girl Mason has just met. The film does not underline it. It ends on the two of them in the light, with nothing settled and no milestone reached, and the cut that would bring the next year never comes.
What the film holds at the close is a face known for three hours and twelve years. The surprise of the first cuts has long worn off; what is left is the accumulation, the boy at six behind the young man at eighteen, and the viewer’s own sense of years doing the work the film refused to do with titles. The milestones are not where the life was. The life was in the drives, the yards, the kitchens, and in a mother at a table, and the film has kept them.
Act III · The Twelve
At this scale the length is compelled: twelve years cannot be felt in ninety minutes, and an unmarked cut between years needs room on each side to land. The large movements resist subtraction. Take out the first marriage, to Bill, the professor who drinks, and the flight from his house, and the mother has no climb; take out the second, to a veteran of Iraq who drinks too, and the cycle is a single accident; take out the sold car and the father has not changed. What gives is at the level of the scene: the camping trips, the photography teacher’s lecture, the late talk of technology and freedom, the plumber’s return. Drift is the method, and the film pays for it here.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a life is lived in the intervals the stories skip, and the milestones, when they come, do not feel like the life. It is shown, not said: a cut lands on a body already changed, and nothing marks the change. A second truth is the mother’s. Olivia climbs from single mother to professor through two husbands who drink, and on the day her son leaves sees that what she worked toward was the passing of her life. The father’s arc is its comic reverse, the free man who becomes the man with the minivan and is happier. A third is the American cycle of men who drink and women who leave. Mason is mostly a witness, and the late disclosure leans toward mood.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The register is level by design, and elevation is not its mode. When it rises, it rises from duration: the cut that turns a boy into an older boy carries a small vertigo the first several times, and at the end a face known for three hours and twelve years gives real transport. The summits are three. The dinner at Bill’s house is dread played in a bright kitchen; Olivia at the table on the day Mason leaves is the strongest scene in the film; the close at Big Bend, light on rock and two young people talking, is its one landscape held for beauty. Between them come cars, kitchens and back yards, played plain, and that low frequency is what holds the axis lowest.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The pattern is the oldest in narrative, the growth of a boy into a man, and here it is not laid over the story but is the story’s whole structure: the film has no other spine than the passage from child to man. Around it the old forms appear as situation. A father hands down an inheritance in a mixtape of the Beatles’ solo songs; step-grandparents in East Texas keep a tribal rite of church and gifts, played as comedy; the journey at the end goes west, out of the towns, into desert and mountains. What holds the axis below the gate is the refusal of construction: no initiation, no ordeal, no return, and a generality that is the typical, every boyhood, more than the archetypal.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is triple: Michael Apted’s Up series, returning to the same people every seven years in documentary; Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films, one actor aged across twenty years of fiction; and Linklater’s own Before films, on this desk at 8.6, actors and characters aged together at long intervals. The turn is to make one fiction feature of the whole span, shot a little each year with the same cast and no makeup, and cut so the years pass unannounced. The stake was as large as any in American film of its decade: twelve years committed, and a child actor who might lose interest or grow badly into the part. Held from the top because the grammar within each year is inherited and unchanged.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the film loses nearly everything it knows. Cast three boys at three ages, or age one actor with makeup, and it becomes a story of growing up; made as it was, it is the showing of time on bodies, faces, voices and a mother’s weight, and the viewer’s own sense of years is the instrument. The unmarked cut is the formal centre: no title says what year it is, and the viewer reads the year from a haircut, a Harry Potter launch, an Obama sign, the colour of a phone. The episodic, unemphatic order is required by the same knowledge, since drama would make milestones. Held from the top because within each year the form is plain, and part of the knowledge rests on the production story the viewer brings.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Twelve years of evidence, and the questions have stayed open rather than closed: whether Mason’s passivity is the film’s truth or its blank; whether Olivia, not Mason, is its protagonist; whether its whiteness and the plumber’s return are a limit of its eye; whether the method is a device carrying a slight story. The film changes on return with the viewer’s own age, which is a real formal property: a first viewing watches the boy, a later one the parents, and the same scenes turn from his to theirs. What holds the axis: the first viewing’s central experience, the surprise of seeing the years pass, does not renew, and the writing on the film, wide in reviews, is not yet deep.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 2010s, so force and reach are scored together. The force is real and distinct. The film showed that the duration of production can be the material of a fiction feature, and that a narrative can be built from the absence of event: a reorganisation of what a feature might hold, done once and at full scale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is wide in attention for a small film, through the Silver Bear for direction at Berlin, a Best Picture nomination, an Academy Award for Patricia Arquette, a large audience for an independent and a lasting place in discussion of time in cinema; it is narrow in redirection, since a method that costs twelve years has almost never been repeated.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, presence, then fabric. The film as released survives whole: one cut, shot on film, no lost or altered version. Presence across twelve years is continuous and, for an independent film, wide: home video, streaming, teaching, and a place in critics’ lists of the century so far. The surface is fixed to its moment in every frame, a Game Boy, a Wii, the 2008 campaign, Facebook in a teenager’s talk, but that is the record the film set out to make, and the period surface is its content rather than an accident of its making. What dates is the late talk about phones and social media, which ages as opinion, not as record. Twelve years is a short demonstration of survival.
Score: 7.9 / 10
What is commanded is hard. Lee Daniel and Shane F. Kelly hold one look and one register across twelve separate shoots. Sandra Adair’s cutting makes the passage between years seamless and lets each segment run at its own pace. Patricia Arquette builds Olivia across a decade into the film’s fullest person; Ethan Hawke’s father is loose and charming and gradually ordinary; Lorelei Linklater’s sister is sardonic from the start. The costs run through the long last third. Ellar Coltrane’s late playing is flat, perhaps by method, and the film rests on him; the dialogue there turns to statement and advice; Bill’s household is staged closer to melodrama than the rest; the plumber’s return is contrived. The photography serves and seldom carries.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the dinner at Bill’s house, glass and threat and children frozen at the table, and the close at Big Bend, light on rock and talk of the moment. One law governs both: life comes as a run of present moments, and nothing is held. Bill’s house is escaped in one cut and never resolved; his children, the step-siblings, simply leave the film, as people leave a child’s life. The sold car, the friends and girlfriends who go without ceremony and Olivia’s last scene obey the same law, applied with discipline across a range from domestic violence to the comedy of the grandparents’ church. The late moralising and the plumber’s return close a circle the law says the film does not close.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on what a film of 165 minutes holds, and it holds a great deal in one structure. The family, in three marriages and the households around them; labour and class, in Olivia’s climb through school to teaching and Mason’s job in a restaurant kitchen; the state and history, in the Iraq war through a returned soldier and the 2008 campaign through yard signs; the sacred, in the grandparents’ church; consumer technology, the film’s clock; the natural order, from suburbs to desert; and consciousness, in Mason. The passing of years integrates them. The limits stand: consciousness is thin at the centre, history enters as texture, the sacred is a scene, and the world beyond the white middle class appears only at the edges.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.2, then The Swerve at 8.9, then The Unconcealment and The Inner Law at 8.7. A form in which time is shown on faces and bodies and the unmarked cut is the instrument of the knowledge; a turn from the documentary series and the aged actor to one fiction made across twelve years; a disclosure that the milestones are not the life, measured on a mother’s face; and one law, nothing is held, from the dinner at Bill’s house to the light at Big Bend.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.6: the register is level by design, and the summits are three, a dinner of dread, a mother at a table and a held landscape. Above it, The Imperishable at 7.9, a survival of twelve years whose late talk dates as opinion, and The Archetypal Deep and The Made at 8.0: a growth into manhood that is the film’s whole structure but refuses initiation, ordeal and return, and a making that holds twelve shoots as one and pays in a flat late lead and a late turn to statement.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.7, The Made at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Swerve at 8.9 and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 falls a tenth short, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 five tenths short and The Imperishable at 7.9 six tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.4 from a sum of 100.2, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Boyhood as released in 2014, the theatrical cut of about 165 minutes, in English, photographed on 35mm at 1.85:1; it is the only version, so the cut judged is the one that exists. Written and directed by Richard Linklater, produced by IFC Productions and Detour Filmproduction and distributed in the United States by IFC Films, photographed by Lee Daniel and Shane F. Kelly and edited by Sandra Adair, with no composed score. Shot a few days at a time from 2002 to 2013; first shown at Sundance in January 2014 and released in the United States that July. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and only once; the rest is described. The order of some scenes in the middle years is held less surely than the whole, and nothing here turns on it. Details that could not be verified, among them the budget, the number of shooting days, the music supervision and the songs that open and close the film, the order of the middle settings, the particular gifts at the birthday in East Texas, and accounts of what was said during the making, are not given.