By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 5 cats
Director: Richard Linklater
Starring: Ellar Coltrane | Ethan Hawke | Lorelei Linklater | Nick Krause | Patricia Arquette
Country: united_states
Year: 2014
Running time: 165
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1065073/reference
Chris says: “When asked what BOYHOOD was about, I stumbled in finding the words for a two-sentence description; having had a few days to mull it over, my response now would be simply, ‘Everything.’ It’s the best way to sum up what this film accomplishes, an experiment with a singular and inspired cumulative effect.
“Writer/director Richard Linklater began filming the project in 2002 with then six-year-old actor Ellar Coltrane as his lead character, Mason. The objective was to film a little every year for the next twelve years and tell Mason’s story as he ages from a child to an adult. Only Michael Apted’s UP films have attempted something like this on such an extensive scale, but keep in mind that series revisits its subjects at seven-year gaps and is also a documentary. Linklater, on the other hand, has a riskier, more complex premise in place: to craft a unified piece of fiction over a dozen-year period with a cast principally made up of the same actors, which also include Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke (as Mason’s divorced parents), plus Linklater’s own daughter, Lorelei (as older sister Samantha) and a few others who enter and exit the narrative at different intervals.
“Naturally, Coltrane is the film’s wild card—one cannot possibly know exactly how a six-year-old will end up at twelve or eighteen, both physically and personality-wise. It’s also daunting for someone so young to commit to such a project and pull it off in terms of acting ability. Fortunately, Linklater made a solid choice in casting Coltrane. In a scene where a pre-teen Mason and his friends attend a midnight book release party for HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE, you can’t help but think of the HARRY POTTER films—eight of them shot over a decade—and how their three primary young stars became more confident and skilled with each installment. You see the exact same process here with Coltrane, only the impact’s greater because it all happens in a little less than three hours. By his teenage years, Coltrane eerily (but subtly) even starts to resemble Hawke a little, the result of both strong casting and acting.
“BOYHOOD proceeds chronologically with no callbacks whatsoever. No subtitles to inform us of what year we’re in, either—pop music cues, different haircuts and the very occasional cultural reference (the 2003 Iraq invasion, Obama’s first presidential run) offer clues as to where we’re at in the timeline. Sometimes, due to a noticeable change in Mason’s appearance, a cut from one year to the next jars but it also thrills, reminding us that life itself always moves forward and continually changes. However, it’s a challenge to construct a narrative chronologically over such a lengthy period of time and keep it entirely cohesive. I’m not sure how much of the story Linklater had mapped out when he began filming, but one detour he takes (Arquette’s disastrous second marriage) tonally stands far apart from the rest of the film. Eventually discarded and barely referred to again, it’s an aberration for sure, but it still indirectly shapes the young man Mason becomes—as does, arguably, everything else in the film, no matter how significant or seemingly mundane.
“Witnessing this process of an actor/character growing up gives the film its hook and its kick, but I kept wondering what its value was beyond that gimmick. Not until more than two hours in, at Mason’s high school graduation party did it hit me: as I watched that scene, its familiarity resonated deeply. The family posing for photographs, the gently awkward conversations, the supermarket-bought spread of cold cuts and pieces of fruit—I’ve been to gatherings awfully similar to if not exactly like this. Stepping back and looking at the film as a whole, one sees that it depicts a specific life story cultivated by character traits, decisions made and their particular consequences and regional embellishments (in this case, small town and suburban Texas culture)—Mason’s childhood is his own and not someone else’s. And yet, the film’s very structure follows a relatable, universal trajectory. Other individual scenes may strike a chord with you as powerfully as the graduation party did for me because as adults, we’ve all lived our own parallel versions of this narrative. Of course, BOYHOOD isn’t meant to be a stand-in for every life that’s lived, but it begs us to examine and compare our own childhoods with Mason’s, considering who we ourselves are and how we came of age. 5 cats
“(This film screened at the 12th Annual Independent Film Festival of Boston; it opens in theaters this July).”
Kyle says: “It may be too early to proclaim BOYHOOD the best film of 2014, but it is certainly not premature to label it one of the major films of the decade. What D.W. Griffith did for epic gestures with INTOLERANCE, Richard Linklater has done for the small gestures of everyday life with BOYHOOD. You are hereby urged to see this film for yourself, before your friends and colleagues ruin it with endless discussion. The experience of BOYHOOD, filmed with the same cast from 2002 to 2013, is very different from Granada Television’s documentary series 7 UP through 56 UP, as well as last year’s AMERICAN PROMISE, the 12-year educational journey of two New York African-American families, although all record the wonders of the passage of time in exquisitely varying detail.
“BOYHOOD follows the story of Mason (Ennar Coltrane) from childhood to college. His formative years are anything but simple; his divorced parents portrayed by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are barely more than children themselves at the journey’s beginning. Mason’s observation that his family reality ‘doesn’t mean it was healthy for us to stay together’ precedes Mom’s announcement that they are moving, so she can afford a better life for her and the two children (Mason’s sister Samantha is played by Lorelei Linklater). Moving is only one of the many traumas that influence the evolution of the family, as Mom returns to school to earn a degree and marries her seemingly supportive professor, an abusive alcoholic whom she must flee with her children — moving yet again. When Dad (Ethan Hawke in the finest performance of his career) says to Mason and Samantha, ‘Your mother is a piece of work!’ he tells us as much about himself as about her.
“At first we respond to the specifics of ordinary childhood experience almost unconsciously, such as rowdy behavior on long family drives, the box of school crayons splayed about the desk top next to the scissors and tracing paper, the bedrooms littered with dirty clothes everywhere — just as much as we react to how random and difficult the experiences of childhood can be. Increasingly we become attuned to the emotional needs of Mom and Dad as well as Mason and Samantha. Thrillingly missing from Linklater’s vision of this particular extended family are the captions telling us how much time has passed and what city they live in, allowing us to make decisions ourselves and to share in the narrative’s progress. We are gradually aware that conversations about teenage sexual activity are taking place, and that Mason is being lectured repeatedly about the importance of responsibility and decisiveness.
“Because so many of the characters in BOYHOOD seem to be stuck in between states of emotion and behavior, the stakes for Mason are set very high. When he wins a silver medal in a photography contest, Mason labels the future as a ‘kind of voluptuous panic.’ Against his awareness that the moment seizes us rather than the other way around, Mason and new friends on the first day of college experience a kind of bliss rarely chronicled so fully on film. I found my eyes filling with tears not from shock, but from the accumulation of details that individually do not seem to matter very much, but cumulatively are overwhelming. On the way out of the cinema, I stopped to look at the many photographs of Ellar Coltrane, Lorelei Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Patricia Arquette taken over the passage of twelve years, hoping to discover something I may have missed in the time I had just spent with them. So brilliant is the writing and directing of Richard Linklater — self-effacing to the point of invisible in a way that sometime characterizes an artist’s transformative work — that it was a shock to see his face among the others. 5 cats
“Monday, July 21, 2014, IFC Center, New York.”
Julie says: “Loved this movie!
“My one sentence description: it’s a movie about what we all go through and struggle with to some degree or another, growing up in life.
“Chris and Kyle described the movie in great detail already. I’m sure by now you all now the basic premise, movie made over 12 years and we get to watch the two kids played by the same actors Ellar Coltrane and Lorelei Linklater grow up over that time as well as watching Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke who were in it for the long haul as well. It was really well done and very well acted.
“I did love that the only queues for what year we were in were based upon the music and hair.
“As an aside, while there are many situations in the movie that we have not all gone through, many of us have grown up with parents who divorced so can relate on that level as well. And with that comes the moving, the ‘putt putt’ golf and bowling with Dad on the weekends and being raised by a smart, independent Mom. Yep been there, done that. We even moved from Philly to Texas and then a couple of times in Texas so I could relate to all the losing friends and making new ones as well.
“My only criticism is I’m not sure anyone other than the grandparents and the preacher had any sort of southern drawl in that movie….the grandparents made me very comfortable and seemed very authentic now that I think about it…. but hey you can’t have everything! I didn’t even think about that till now. I never lived in Houston but visited it once – ugly just as depicted in the movie- also never lived in San Marcos which I’d imagine is still a quaint little town as was also depicted to some degree in the movie.
“I was thinking about SLACKER and how that truly seemed to mimic many things in my Texas youth and it was also done by Linklater! It all makes sense now! Go figure – he grew up there ! I did not know anything about the director when I saw SLACKER.”