We’ve paused Schindler’s List for this particular taco break before, more or less, and hosted Lovefests and Hatefests that were a big part of building the Dissolve’s comment-section community from which we sprung, but time always gives us new examples.  And this is Lovefest and Hatefest in one.

What’s a film–and I’ll widen the net to TV shows, books, bands, and works of art in general–where the overwhelming critical consensus is on one side and you are on the other?

My go-to example of this for the last few years has been Boyhood, which seemed almost unbearably shallow to me.  I didn’t need it to represent my particular adolescence, but it also didn’t come close to capturing even the feel of it.  There’s a half-asleep vibe to the whole film–all Wordsworthian emotion recollected in tranquility, nothing close to the full-color, high-stakes emotional turmoil of actual childhood, where everything feels like it matters immensely.  Plenty of artists have captured that same sensation even in laidback, quiet films, and Linklater has been one of them, but Boyhood completely misses for me.  When it does reach for emotion, it grabs a sledgehammer, and it doesn’t manage to give those enormous whacks of significance–Arquette’s final speech, the terrible stepfathers, stoned college student pondering about the nature of living in the moment–the commitment to land.  There’s an artificiality to it all.  Here’s the speech that will get her the Oscar.  Here’s the drama that we won’t follow up on at all because the dropped plot is more artistic.  Here’s where the movie’s thesis on itself is vocalized but given just enough ironic distance that any criticism of its triteness will miss the point.

I don’t object to Boyhood being about a white boy in a predominantly white cultural context, but the way the film deals with women and people of color makes my skin crawl.  Arquette’s iconic speech is harsh and affecting, a woman lashing out at exactly the same viewpoint her son will later treasure–it’s always now, there’s the moment and then the moment’s gone, life is a succession of disconnected events–but of course it has to always be her raging against her teenage son for being glad to go off to college.  Of course her life has been defined by the departures of various men–here a husband, there a boyfriend, and now a son.  The job she always wanted becomes an afterthought in this speech, something she struggled for but that isn’t going to compensate her in any way for this viciously emerging case of empty nest syndrome.  The feelings are legitimate.  Arquette’s character has been angry for the whole film, and I’m glad there’s an eruption.  But she doesn’t even get to have her eruption be about her.  There are two lines in that speech that aren’t specifically about her being either a wife or a mother.  Once she gets her kids off to college, what’s next is “[her] fucking funeral.”  And this, to me, does not feel earned by the film’s preceding run-time (though there’s a lot of run-time): Arquette has not felt throughout like a woman so defined by these roles that, in losing them, she’ll lose herself.

I have seen a better, subtler, and more woman-centric take on this theme from Aaron Sorkin, a man not known for either subtlety or feminism.  Linklater could certainly do better.  He doesn’t seem to have any problem giving Ethan Hawke’s Mason Sr. a life that fills up as it goes along.  But this is Boys Become Men, Women Become Ghosts, so Olivia just doesn’t matter in the same way, just like Samantha doesn’t matter in the same way Mason does.  It’s all fodder for a male bonding moment where the two Masons can reflect on how much better all their lives would have been if Olivia had just given Mason Sr. more of a chance.

Though none of that makes me cringe as hard as when the Latino day laborer Olivia advised to go to college (on the basis of a minute-long conversation that does not, to the best of my recollection, include any ideas about how he’ll pay for this or any tips for embarking on this dramatic life change, just your standard “here’s a tip: get a better job!” only with better intentions) resurfaces late in the film to be a much more successful restaurant assistant manager who credits the entire shift in his life to Olivia.  And see, her own kids aren’t listening to her right now, so it’s a nice time for a stranger to swoop in and tell her how she changed his life for the better.  But you know what would be even nicer?  If the only real moment of validation for Olivia didn’t come from a heavy-handed “non-white character as prop” moment that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hallmark movie.

There are good moments in Boyhood.  But it feels entirely lazy to me, a work that justifies its lack of structure by saying that life lacks structure and that justifies all its clumsiness by saying that life has that clumsiness too.  It’s a documentary without rigor.  It’s life fictionalized to be made less interesting.

I’m not the only person in the entire world who feels this way, but I’m certainly in the minority.  (I’m robbed of the Scott Tobias takedown, Birdman-style!)  So where do you stand (nearly) alone, fellow Soluters?  What valiant charges of the Light Brigade would you mount in favor of or in opposition to a particular work?

Alternately, use the comments section to tell me that I am wrong about Boyhood.