**Spoiler Alert**
Director: Richard Linklater/Starring: Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke and Lorelei Linklater
Boyhood arrives on a golden chariot of hype into this Summer season of CGI apes and 3D, 2D and Real-D drivel, which makes it seem entirely out of place and maybe unwelcome. But make no mistake; it may be a Summer movie-misfit, but it is far from being unwelcome. Linklater's film more than than lives up to its hype. I left the theater feeling--something not normally experienced in theaters at this time of year. The variety of emotions it elicited were somewhat contradictory; elation, melancholy, hope and optimism and maybe unbearable sadness.
It is hardly a mystery that the movie was essentially 12 years in the making, capturing the fictitious lives of a small family--but mostly a boy's--in that span. That Linklater is able to employ this narrative device in telling such a seemingly simple story in an engaging and resonant manner, is quite a feat.
Set in various Texas towns and cities, Boyhood tells the story of how a family, consisting of a boy named Mason (an excellent Ellar Coltrane) and his mother (an equally excellent Patricia Arquette) and sister Samantha (Linklater's daughter Lorelei) eke out a very modest existence in their shabby Austin home. Mason is six-year's old when the story begins; his sister only a smidgen older. They share a room and fight and cry like little children do and will. Their mother is divorced from the children's father (an excellent Ethan Hawke), who has recently returned from a job gig in Alaska. Though he is an amiable, loving father, he is also not entirely reliable and has been woefully absent for extended periods from his children's lives. To be near the children's grandmother, the mother moves the family to Houston, the first in many relocations. The father's re-emergence comes on the heels of the mother's burgeoning romance with her college professor Bill (Marco Perella), who has two kids of his own. The two families eventually merge into a happy unit, with Mason's father visiting every fortnight.
The magic spell Linklater casts; showing the characters (and actors) aging before our eyes, starts to take effect. As the story unfolds and the characters/actors age, we see change materialize onscreen and it is astonishing. Mason and his family show signs of not only physical growth but the dramatic effects of experience and maturity. Linklater accomplishes this so seamlessly, without calling attention to what seems like a special effect but what is really skillful editing.
The peaceable, familial arrangement is eventually disrupted by Bill's drinking and disturbing bouts of rage, which eventually drives the mother and the kids away. Mason and Samantha's separation from their step-siblings is heartbreaking, which we feel acutely as their mother's fleeing vehicle pulls away from the house and once again, into disquieting uncertainty. While the mother and children grapple with their lives, the father struggles with elusive maturity and relationships of his own.
Coltrane inhabits his character so thoroughly it could scarcely be called acting. He isn't alone in this regard; Arquette, Linklater and Hawke also become fully-realized, fully-developed people we see and know in the real world. One of the great strengths of the film, which also reflects Richard Linklater's ability as a filmmaker, is its ability to draw us into the lives of unremarkable people who nonetheless become unique by virtue of their resilience in the face of change and adversity, which not only makes them very American, but something very human.
If Boyhood didn't have moving characters and an immersive story, the aging we see onscreen might be dismissed as a frivolous gimmick, something momentarily amusing. In Linklater's hands, it becomes something sublime; a narrative method by which an individual's growth can almost be seen like tree-rings.
In one of the most sobering scenes I've seen in a film this year, we see Mason packing for college while his mother sits pensively, watching her son discard and retain possessions. The full reality of the situation--her time with her children effectively at an end and her relationship with them as adults just beggining--impacts her viscerally, which leaves her sobbing almost uncontrollably. What she feels is not only the wrench of separation and the anxiety of an empty nest, but a kind of despairing is-this-it? moment. She says (paraphrasing) "I thought there would be more to this;" which elicited an empathetic, powerful reaction from me; bordering on tears.
The film ends with Mason in transition; his college life before him and the promise of relationships ahead. What has he learned? What will become of him? Whatever happens, we can be grateful to Linklater for lovingly and painstakingly exploring the character's life for twelve years, which is distilled into an absorbing two-hour and forty-minute film.
Boyhood has evoked comparisons to Michael Apted's Up series but seeing Linklater's film brought to mind photographer Nicholas Nixon's beautiful Brown Sisters series. Capturing portraits of four sisters together, once-a-year over a 35 year span, one sees how life and experiences mold and shape one's face, body and spirit. What is fascinating to behold are the small triumphs and disappointments; the good and bad years that hew grooves and wrinkles upon one's visage; telling stories beyond our immediate perception. If Boyhood isn't an answer to Nixon's masterwork, it certainly reaches for the same effect. And if Apted and Nixon documented their subjects in fact, Linklater approaches his in narrative; achieving something singular, moving and memorable.
