The movie opens with a 7 year-old Mason Evans Jr. (played by Ellar Coltrane) lying in the grass and staring at the clouds. It ends with that same actor 12 years later stating an inanity that he considers profound. That is the shtick of this movie. Over a 12 year period, the same core of actors filmed for 46 days, so about 4 days a year. To watch the kids grow up before you is pretty cool, but that doesn’t make a film; that makes home movies. If this exact same film was made all at once with multiple actors playing Mason at the various ages of development, it would be widely panned as a boring, going nowhere coming-of-age stinker. The shtick is all this movie has.
Mason starts off as a cute kid but develops into a lost teenager who looks surprisingly unkempt but somehow attracts hot girls. So many scenes go nowhere. At one point, we see Mason being bullied in the boys’ restroom and that’s an end of that. There is no resolution, no response on his part, just a move to the next part of his life. By the end, Mason is a youth who seems to shrug his shoulders to show emotion and many of his lines include “I guess” or “I don’t know.”
One message of the film is that fathers suck. Yeah, dads are mostly bad guys, usually drunkards who may even brutalize their wives. Mason’s real father (played by Ethan Hawke) is initially an irresponsible doper who eventually gets his act together. But he isn’t so much a father as a buddy. There is nothing disciplinary about Mason Sr., just a cool guy and big brother figure.
The message on mothers isn’t all that great either. Mason’s mom (Patricia Arquette) starts off as a struggling single-mother but she goes back to school to get a degree for a better job. Along the way, she marries one of her professors (the drunken brute) then, after getting her master’s degree, she marries one of her students (who is merely a drunk). When Mason leaves for college, she breaks down that her life is over.
Why couldn’t he let the characters be apolitical? No, Mason’s parents are both Democrats, his father more vociferously so. His father, who only spends a couple weekends a month with them, decided to spend one of those days posting Obama/Biden signs. He even has Mason steal a McCain sign from a yard. Then we have the old man who threatens to shoot Mason for daring to ask if he can post an Obama sign. See, Republicans are nasty, villainous people. Later, we meet an Iraq war vet who says it was a war for oil; he later descends into drunkenness and is written out of the story. See! Look what Bush’s War did to the veterans. However, there was a bit of fun poked at Obama supporters; one young mother explains how she sees herself in a make-out session with handsome Senator Obama.
The cultural references were fun, from Mason’s sister singing Brittany Spears, to Harry Potter excitement, to Lady Gaga, to the iPhone. Shot as it was provided the ability to give a very accurate view of the given year (no anachronisms to be found).
The shtick is all that carries this movie and it didn’t carry it very far for me.
