It was crucial, with “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011), to stay to the bittersweet end. A regiment of apes, loosed from bondage and commanded by a chimp named Caesar, the king of the swingers, took to the woods beyond San Francisco and fêted their freedom in leaps and bounds. Then, during the final credits, a single drop of blood, bearing a fatal strain of simian flu, fell from the nose of an airline pilot, signalling the start of a pandemic. As we join the sequel, “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” maps reveal the global spread of the infection, suggesting that, while apes are enjoying a new day, mankind has donned its last pajamas and put out the light.
Surprisingly, we are still in the Bay Area. These apes have a whole world to play with, but they choose to stick to their familiar forest. Pity. I was hoping that Caesar would conquer Gaul or something—you know, hang out with hot French gibbons who would teach him to smoke and go on strike over their retirement plans. Instead, he leads a thoroughly conservative American life. He inhabits a leafy neighborhood, with a loving partner, a son who is gratifyingly weaker than him, and a new baby. His community is close-knit; residents communicate in a blend of gestures, grunts, and very plain English, not unlike the customers in a sports bar. There is even a teacher, Maurice the orangutan, who has learned to write—the words “Ape not kill ape” are scrawled on a rock, proving that Maurice is as pure of heart as he is poor at grammar. What the apes lack is a foreign policy, but they are forced to devise one, double-quick, when a human, of all things, strays into their domain. Where did he come from?
The answer, of course, is San Francisco, where a few hundred men and women, survivors of the disease, are scratching out a meagre living downtown. Compared with the apes, they are woefully short on discipline and self-sufficiency, and you soon begin to ask just what was so damned sapiens about Homo in the first place. That was true of “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” too, but the dramatic balance between man and primate was precise, thanks in part to a lovely performance from John Lithgow, as an Alzheimer’s sufferer whom Caesar was anxious to protect. Their scenes together would have made Charles Darwin’s head spin around, and there is nothing to match them here; the human roles are vague and underwritten, with Gary Oldman as a leading belligerent, and Jason Clarke and Keri Russell as Malcolm and Ellie, a pro-ape, anti-conflict couple who look a bit stunned throughout, as if still amazed that years of recycling didn’t manage to save the Earth. Clarke was very good as the friendly torturer in “Zero Dark Thirty,” but here he is simply a foil for his hairy acquaintances—his lowers and betters.
Technically, they wipe the floor. The C.G.I., so dazzling in “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” delivers marvels afresh; through the wonders of motion capture, every frown, snarl, and scurry of the actors, led by Andy Serkis as Caesar, is bodied forth into apehood. Caesar’s son, for instance, performed by Nick Thurston, needs only one look to convince us of his gentleness, and of his bewilderment at the violence into which he is helplessly thrust—first, when he is clawed by a bear, and then when, along with the rest of the clan, he is pitched into battle against men. This has been a long time brewing; Caesar sought to avoid it, riding into town at the head of an ape army and barking, “Apes do not want war,” but he is undone by the plotting of Koba (Toby Kebbell), a bonobo with a scarred face and a bad attitude. There is one tremendous scene in which Koba acts like an old-school chimp in a zoo, all floppy arm waves and clownish hoo-hoos, in order to disarm a couple of dolts before he kills them, but elsewhere his meanness verges on a kind of savage kitsch, and I had to smother a laugh as he burst through a wall of nighttime fire, on horseback, toting an automatic weapon, like something created by Quentin Tarantino for Discovery Channel.
What is missing from the film is wit—the deep wit that comes from playing off species and environments against each other. It was much more satisfying to watch a mob of apes swarm darkly through the gleaming office of a biotech firm, in the previous movie, than it is to see them pass from the dank, shadowy menace of the woods to the equally dank shadows of a ruined San Francisco. “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” is directed by Matt Reeves, who, unlike his predecessor, Rupert Wyatt, finds little that is amusing, curious, or surreal in the plight of his characters. Instead, we get heaps of blood and thunder, notably in the final third, and Reeves clings far more needily than Wyatt did to the standard form of the blockbuster: busy brutality, digital magic, indifference to human figures, a mawkish moistness (brace yourself for weepy chimps), and a risible refusal to contemplate the joys of sex—which are, let’s face it, a major feature of the average ape day. Bonobos, bless them, think about nothing else. Still, we do get a touching final pact between Malcolm and Caesar, brow to jutting brow: “I thought we had a chance,” one says to the other. But, hang on, they’re standing near what used to be City Hall, and Proposition 8 has long since been overturned; what better place to make the whole thing legal? Go on, monkey, pop the question! Man up!
The boy of “Boyhood” is Mason (Ellar Coltrane), whose story we follow, in fits and starts, until he is no longer a boy at all; the movie, written and directed by Richard Linklater, was shot over twelve years. When we initially meet Mason, he is in first grade, living in Texas with his older sister, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), and his mother, Olivia (Patricia Arquette). His parents are divorced, and the children have not seen their father, Mason, Sr. (Ethan Hawke), for months. In other words, we are joining Mason on a voyage that has already hit the rocks, and on a tough, daily quest to refloat and sail on. Rarely does a childhood like this involve what Wordsworth called “the glory and the freshness of a dream.” Instead, it means being woken up in the early morning by your sister, who annoys you with her Britney Spears impression, whereupon your mom storms in and tells you to go back to sleep. Some dream.
Olivia moves the family from town to town. She goes back to school, and marries her professor, a silver-haired smiler who calcifies into a drunk; in one remarkable sequence, Mason and his stepbrother cycle blithely home, on a balmy day, just in time to see Olivia lying on the floor of the garage, felled by a blow from her husband. She then takes up with an Iraq veteran, who becomes a corrections officer, and whom we see sitting on the front porch, clutching his can of beer, seething at an uncorrectable world. So many of the men in “Boyhood” seem like losers, or bullies, or both, minds and mouths locked tight with disapproval and denial, and the challenge for Mason—and, you feel, for any kid—is not just to survive the squalls of youth but somehow to grow from boy to man without suffering a death of the spirit.
More complex is the case of Mason, Sr.—a devoted performance from Hawke, surrendering to time’s flow. At first blush, he is flighty and feckless, and there are scores of blushes to come, as in the tricky moment at an Astros game, amid a raucous crowd, when Mason turns to his dad and asks whether he has a job. Yet his love for the kids is a constant, even if his practical care is a fragment of what their mother provides, and we are not surprised—though we are vastly relieved—when Mason and Samantha wing it to the brink of adult life. The profuse pleasures of “Boyhood” spring not from amazement but from recognition—from saying, Yes, that’s true, and that feels right, or that’s how it was for me, too.
One evening in 2005, Mason and Samantha, suitably gowned, line up at a bookstore, like millions of kids, to get their midnight copies of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” leaving us with a difficult question: We traced the arc of Harry’s youth, too, in even greater detail than Linklater can furnish, so how come we feel that we know Mason so much better? Perhaps because Harry’s life, on the page and, even more luridly, onscreen, was measured out in highlights, as the plot demanded, whereas Mason is revealed in a string of lowlights, or in those episodes which seem dim and dull at the time, and only later shine in memory’s cave. A haircut, in short, matters more than a Quidditch match. We happen upon ourselves when nothing much happens to us, and we are transformed in the process; that is why the Mason with the earring from whom we take our leave, on his first, blissed-out day of college, both is and is not the affable imp of seven, or the mumbler who bumped his way through puberty, and that twin sense of continuity and interruption—of life itself as tracking shot and jump cut—applies to everyone. Just like the final fade. ♦
