Boyhood review

                 Since emerging from and headlining the indie film explosion of the early ‘90s, Austin Texas director Richard Linklater has never been content to stay in familiar territory, constantly pushing himself into unexplored and challenging storytelling avenues. While contemporaries such as Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith were defining their brand and building a devoted fanbase on genre familiarity, Linklater strove to try new things and ignore all expectations.  Later on when he would occasionally make a mainstream comedy like “School of Rock,” in the context of his wildly diverse career even that felt like formal experiment to make a movie in direct opposition to his interest in narrative stream-of-consciousness, displayed in films such as “Slacker” and “Waking Life.”

                With this in mind, it seems only fitting that Linklater would be using his off-time between the  shoots of his regular film schedules to whittle away at a 12 year passion project, documenting the growth and the age of the same cast around the malleable blueprint of a plot. “Boyhood,” in many ways, is the ultimate thesis of Linklater’s formal interests in storytelling and character examination through means of pure cinema. Of course, all of this would mean a whole lot of nothing if it weren’t also emotionally engaging, brutally honest and surprisingly funny.

                On the surface this film tells the story of Mason (Ellar Coltrane), a Texas-born child named named Mason (Ellar Coltrane) as hewho transitions from childhood to manhood, starting at age six when the production began in 2002 and ending with his move to college in 2014. Certainly, the movie’s center of consciousness is with Mason and he's our emotional conduit through the broader story of his broken family (and to a greater extent, the condition of post-911 Americana). But it is within the journey of his formative years that the lives of his parents also play out in subtle complexity.  After a rocky divorce his mother, played by Patricia Arquette, goes back to college to make a better living for Mason and his older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), and his father, played by Ethan Hawk, also makes his transition from deadbeat struggling musician to accepting eventual responsibility.  Each story interweaves and informs the other, creating a breathy, yet dense emotional tapestry of modern suburban angst.

                By casting a six year old unknown and hoping that he would appropriately age into the role, Linklater gambled on the entirety of the film’s artistic success on this actor, and luckily for him the experiment pays off without ever feeling like a needless gimmick or publicity stunt.  Earlier on  Coltrane's performace is interior and quietly effecting, oftentimes letting the louder characters in his scenes shape his on screen personality through contrast. As he grows the character slowly exposes a firmer identity and develops from a cypher of our own nostalgia into having his own distinct perspective and intellectual agency. Both Ethan Hawk and Patricia Arquette are better here than they may have ever been before and, impressively, they sustain their performance over the long period, infusing their characters with the natural growth they have accumulated both as actors and as people. Simply put, they ‘act’ real, and the significant trick that the movie plays on the audience is that after a while you stop thinking about production’s logistics.

                Almost a formal cousin to Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” trilogy, this film is interested in the deep exploration of character through dialogue, social milieu, and scenic rhythms in editing that outlines the passage of time.  Because of the purposely fluid nature of the plot—oftentimes avoiding the kinds of traditional conceits and beats of more rigorously written coming of age dramas—“Boyhood” may alienate some audiences hoping for the excitement of rising tensions, the exuberance of an underlined ‘ah-ha’ moment, or the comfort of resolution.  What you get instead is a teenage life lived in all its messy and glorious intricacies.

Grade: A-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Aug-2014