Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
Soon after the new Netflix drama Boyhood begins, a 13-year-old boy finds himself arrested for murder. A group of six officers bursts into the family’s modest home early one morning, and a black-clad cop rushes upstairs to aim his assault rifle at the young suspect, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper). When the boy rises from his bed, it’s clear he’s wet himself in fear. For much of the pilot, it’s hard not to wonder if the cops are wrong: With his doe-eyed, small frame, and timid, whiny demeanor, Jamie seems incapable of serious violence. Then his online history is revealed, with investigators focusing on the “aggressive” comments he leaves under nude Instagram photos of models. “How do you feel about women, Jamie?” one detective asks. It’s a big question for a kid, but the answer will determine his fate.
“Adolescence” is not a detective story. By the end of the interrogation scene, it becomes clear that Jamie has killed one of his classmates, a girl named Katie. The show, set in the UK, is essentially a “why” explanation, told largely from the perspective of the adults around him: his parents (Stephen Graham and Christine Tremarco), a clinical psychologist (Erin Doherty) and Detective Chief Inspector Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters), who is struggling with his own strained relationship with his teenage son, Adam. Although we learn about different aspects of Jamie’s life through these disparate perspectives, they never come together to form a coherent whole.
Each of the show’s four-hour episodes was filmed in a single take, allowing us to immerse ourselves in, for example, the tense sixty minutes at the precinct immediately following Jamie’s arrest, or Bascomb’s disconcerting visit to Jamie’s (and Adam’s) school, where the students display a callous but believable indifference to the investigation. Although these scenes take place in real time, the narrative as a whole moves in fits and starts, with episodes separating days or months in which Jamie becomes something of a cause célèbre for the internet’s scariest men.
The outstanding third chapter, a two-character chamber piece set in the juvenile detention facility where Jamie is being held before his trial, makes the most of the format’s claustrophobic potential. Psychologist Briony, who has become close enough to Jamie to sneak him hot cocoa, encounters unexpected resistance when she begins her assessment. The once-docile Jamie, convinced he’s being manipulated, becomes irascible and unstable. Cooper, who has shown remarkable restraint all season, finally shows his range, and Doherty is heartbreaking as a professional who loathes the role she’s forced to play in Jamie’s legal saga, even as she confronts his capacity for cruelty.
That theme is the show’s most defining characteristic: “Adolescence” is an expression of parental panic, an attempt to come to grips with the boy crisis and the modern masculinity that technology has defined. The small-screen cautionary tales about youth culture tend to focus on girls: the high-school drama “Euphoria,” a horror story for adults, has a predominantly female cast, as does last year’s “Social Studies,” a documentary series in which Lauren Greenfield screen-captures teenagers’ phones to show what it’s like to grow up online. (Spoiler alert: It’s not great!) These shows reflect what we now know all too well: For a young girl, the Internet can be a place that can be intimidating, if not downright dangerous. In pop culture, as in life, we seem less sure how to address the specific concerns of boys, who now struggle more than their female peers, both academically and socially. The recent shift to the right among young people that helped elect Donald Trump president has only heightened the urgency of the search for answers.
Unfortunately, Boyhood’s shrill, fragmented approach undermines its attempts to shed light. Andrew Tate, incels, and the manosphere are all mentioned by name, and the plot could easily, if crudely, be summed up in the ever-viral quote usually attributed to Margaret Atwood: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” But I ended up wishing that the show could provide some real substance to its young male characters, especially those who aren’t Jamie. (We learn almost nothing about how even his closest friends are considering murder, though one of them is eventually charged with complicity.) Because the show chooses to focus more on the social factors that make such murder possible than on Jamie’s specific desires and anxieties, his perspective is always just that: an outsider’s. And while the film pays lip service to Katie's forgotten humanity, its true sympathy lies less with the victim than with the adult observers trying to make sense of it all.
Sourse: newyorker.com
