Boyhood
Like the fabled Jesuit, Richard Linklater has taken the boy and given us the man. In so doing, he's created a film that I love more than I can say. And there is hardly a better, or nobler thing a film can do than inspire love.
This beautiful, mysterious movie is a time-lapse study of Mason, growing up from around the age of five to 18, from primary school to his first day in college. It is an intimate epic: over 12 years, Linklater worked with the young actor Ellar Coltrane, shooting scenes every year with him and other cast members, who grow visibly and heart-stoppingly older around him. The director's daughter, Lorelei Linklater, plays Mason's older sister, Samantha; Patricia Arquette is superb as their divorced single mom, hard-working and aspirational, but worryingly condemned to hook up with drunks and give the kids abusive stepdads. Ethan Hawke – his lean, chiselled face softening as the years go by – plays the kids' feckless and unreliable but charming father, who shows up every few weeks in his cool car. And Mason's own face changes from its young, moony openness to a closed, grown-up handsomeness. It is the face he will learn to present to the world.
Boyhood is in touch with a simple, urgent truth: life is terrifyingly short. While our childhood in progress seems like an aeon, to our parents it flashes past in a dreamlike instant. Then to us, afterwards, it changes from an assumed sturdy narrative into a swirling constellation of remembered and half-remembered moments, which drift in and out of reach. It is with something like awe you grasp the obvious fact that Linklater's time-lapse technique could be easily applied to every other character in the film. Children and adults are not separate species.
Perhaps Linklater and Ellar Coltrane will come back for sequels: Manhood, Middle Age and so on. Part of me longs to see Mason again, and part thinks there is an exquisitely perfect humility in how the film gently leaves him with his new friends in college. Either way, it is one of the great films of the decade.
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