Boyhood

Richard Linklater is, in his modest and understated way, one of the most significant cinematic pioneers of the past twenty-five years. David Fincher and Christopher Nolan may be the great visual stylists of the period. James Cameron and Alfonso Cuarón are working closer to the cutting edge of technological spectacle. Spike Jonze, Ang Lee, and Jane Campion are exploring new emotional terrain specific to our place and time. And Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers are unequalled at reminding us why we love going to the movies in the first place. But Linklater is the filmmaker who is exploring the basic cinematic form in the most innovative ways, along the lines of the great directors of the '60s and '70s, like Truffaut, Godard, Altman, Bergman, Freidkin, and Cassavetes. From his first major success, Slacker (1991), the no-budget, generation-defining breakthrough that all but launched the new-independent film movement of the 1990s; to his recent, genre-creating docu-satire Bernie  (2011), an enlightening mash-up of true crime and mockumentary; to his Before Sunrise trilogy (or perhaps it’s an on-going series), in which viewers eavesdrop every nine years on the continuing saga of the same two neurotic, verbose, passionate lovers; Linklater’s sometimes brilliant and sometimes tedious experiments with time, format, and narrative structure have expanded the potential and vitality of the movies to an extent few other filmmakers have achieved. 

With his latest picture, Boyhood, Linklater weaves the coming-of-age tapestry of a boy named Mason (Ellar Coltrane). Linklater made this film over a twelve-year period, and Coltrane ages in real-time as Mason grows up. We follow Mason as he undergoes the rituals and ordeals of youth: advancing through school, experimenting with identity, and weathering changes in his family, especially his relationships with his divorced parents (Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke). This groundbreaking approach to storytelling enables Linklater to explore parent-child dynamics during the most significant years of development with the same child actors throughout the film’s timespan, rather than the traditional way of using different kids to play the same characters at various ages. In so doing he collapses the maturation-over-time dynamic of his Before Sunrise series into a single film.`

But Boyhood is more than a production gimmick or a life told through Cliffs Notes. Linklater and his cast, including his daughter Lorelei Linklater as Mason’s older sister, craft an emotional arc that flows organically from year to year without feeling thin, contrived, or overly episodic. While the narrative line is not especially compelling, the film contains a bounty of captivating, nuanced observations. We don’t just passively watch Mason and his family pass through the usual milestones of growing up. Instead, Linklater evokes our memories of those times in our own lives, as well as our children’s lives, our friends' lives, and the life of our country during the eventful years between 2002 and 2014. Like most of Linklater’s pictures, Boyhood takes place in Texas, but while the story is specific to place, class, ethnicity, and generation, often to humorous effect, it also contains an undeniable universality. It’s about how we, as children, discover the world and our place in it.

Probably every contemporary filmmaker and wannabe filmmaker who is also a parent has hit upon the idea of shooting a movie over a period of many years with a child protagonist, but I’m glad that Linklater is the one who finally did it. He's one of a handful of contemporary writer/directors capable of producing a simple, poetic work of art from this process, rather than a high-concept stunt that’s more about its production than anything else. Linklater has made several films that take place in a single day, and he possesses a distinct ability to explore major issues and zeitgeist-y notions through minimalist stories about seemingly everyday occurrences. This skill translates well to a film that takes place over more than a decade but still requires an ability to find profound meaning in smaller, more closely-observed periods of time. 

Linklater’s skill as a filmmaker and ability to craft the story matures along with the cast, but from the onset, he wisely avoids drawing direct attention to the passage of time in the movie. Lesser directors might have assigned different visual styles to different stages in Mason’s life. The film’s visual consistency renders invisible the necessary chronological ellipses. This choice prevents Boyhood from feeling overly long.  Despite the film's crystal-clear trajectory, we feel slightly on edge while watching it, never quite sure where the story will go next. We’ve grown so accustomed to major twists and turns in movies that we expect a shocking event or emotional epiphany around every corner, even though the events of life that shape us usually seem more gradual and mundane, especially in the moment. In this way, Boyhood gives viewers a vicarious understanding of what I assume all parents must experience: the constant worry about potential, though unlikely, disasters that might befall their sons and daughters, coupled with an almost total disregard of the comparatively more ordinary, but far more potent, challenges that almost every young person must face. Long-form episodic television has practically trained modern audiences to expect some kind of climax every 10 to 12 minutes, so the idea of watching a compelling but relatively uneventful and undelineated narrative unfold for nearly three hours feels downright radical. But Boyhood doesn’t try to be anything more than a small, compassionate, time-lapse glimpse of a fairly ordinary family. Its brilliance is in its subtlety and the empathy it creates in us. And despite its unassuming nature, there is no mistaking the film’s extraordinary achievement.