Boyhood
Directed by: Richard Linklater
Written by: Richard Linklater
Starring: Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, Lorelei Linklater, Marco Perella, Brad Hawkins, Richard Jones, Karen Jones, Charlie Sexton, Zoe Graham, Richard Robichaux
Drama - 166 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 18 July 2014
Written by: Richard Linklater
Starring: Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, Lorelei Linklater, Marco Perella, Brad Hawkins, Richard Jones, Karen Jones, Charlie Sexton, Zoe Graham, Richard Robichaux
Drama - 166 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 18 July 2014
Richard Linklater’s Before series may be my favorite film franchise. That indie trilogy packs more punch than the Avengers, is deeper than however brooding and dark you make new iterations of Batman or Superman, and lets us catch up with old friends once a decade to see how they change and mature. What an ambitious idea; three movies roughly 10 years apart each featuring the same two characters walking and talking. Concerning ambition and sheer fortitude, Boyhood leapfrogs the Before films and shatters conventional expectations on how audiences consider the concept of time in movies.
Linklater shot Boyhood over a period of 12 years shooting for a few days each year. We watch the boy of Boyhood, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), grow up from a six year old child into a lanky 18 year old almost man. There is no overarching plot across the years; that is not the point. We are watching a life, a boy figure out his surroundings and his place in it. When you look back on your childhood, you do not remember a linear series of events. Most likely, you remember bits and pieces. You remember your front yard, riding bikes with your friends, and even those friends fade in and out and are replaced by new friends.
Linklater shot Boyhood over a period of 12 years shooting for a few days each year. We watch the boy of Boyhood, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), grow up from a six year old child into a lanky 18 year old almost man. There is no overarching plot across the years; that is not the point. We are watching a life, a boy figure out his surroundings and his place in it. When you look back on your childhood, you do not remember a linear series of events. Most likely, you remember bits and pieces. You remember your front yard, riding bikes with your friends, and even those friends fade in and out and are replaced by new friends.
I like to think Boyhood is Mason remembering the past. It begins with him lying on his back staring at the sky; perhaps this is Mason’s first fundamental childhood memory where conscious thought takes root as he wonders about his place in the universe. Boyhood ends not when Mason turns 18 and the law considers him an adult, but ends when mentally he enters the next phase. Childhood explorations and minor traumas are gone and college is here. Entering college was a major transformation for most of us. As Mason’s father says, “College is where you find your people.” Yes sir. We are forced to be around those we would never choose to associate with in middle and high school, but college is where you really get to choose your crowd and define your future self.
Ethan Hawke (2013’s Before Midnight) plays Mason’s father and undergoes his own metamorphosis from absent father, to weekend dad, to minivan-driving responsible family man. Mason’s mother, Olivia (Patricia Arquette), grinds out the years as a struggling single mother trying to raise her kids, finish her own education, and makes a series of questionable choices concerning the men she chooses to latch on to. Since Boyhood is more a series of episodes and snapshot scenes, there is no standard rising action, climax, falling action sequence of events. Drama evolves from realism instead of manufactured melodrama. Sure, an escalating alcoholic stepfather borders on melodrama but his actions and their consequences are quite real.
There are no on screen titles to tell us when years shift. We can usually tell by Mason’s hairstyle or a sudden growth spurt. Pop culture references litter the background as the soundtrack gives us a hint to where we are or Mason’s sister, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater – the director’s daughter), sings a Britney Spears song. Samantha is an odd fit in Boyhood. First, unlike Mason, she looks nothing like the product of Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette, and as the years progress, her acting ability actually decreases in skill. She is awkward, shy, and by the end, is a monosyllabic fly on the wall.
Do not take away the assumption nothing happens in the movie. There are no shootouts, fist fights, or destructive secrets, but there is a lot of something you do not usually experience in a theater, real emotions, true to life situations, pretty much situations you get in a Richard Linklater film. The kids speak in short, stuttered sentences just as they do at home around your dinner table. The adults get longer speeches and we experience them through Mason’s eyes. He is not a casual observer. He absorbs them as the recipient of platitudes and adult preaching; the object of unending ‘you should do this, you should do that’ speeches. Not all of the longer conversations by adults are like this. Hawke gives an amusing talk about The Beatles and their respective solo projects while Arquette gets what may be the movie’s most emotional punch toward the end when she exclaims, “I thought there would be more!”
Linklater took a significant risk with Boyhood. 12 years of intermittent shooting and competing ideas of where to take the story could have ended up a big mess and a pile of wasted time. However, Boyhood will open your eyes to cinema you have never seen before. No film has ever been shot over such a long period of time. Walking out of the theater, you will most likely remember it for a lot longer than that.
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