Movie Review: Boyhood

Boyhood...best of the year or best of the decade? I don't know but Richard Linklater's newest film is unlike anything I've ever seen before. A true marvel of filmmaking.

Boyhood is Linklater's decade plus passion project about coming of age in modern America. Filmed intermittently over a period of twelve years, the movie follows the life of a Texas boy named Mason Jr. from age six to eighteen. You watch him grow before your eyes in a stunning display of time lapse cinema. Linklater captures the subtle joys and debilitating hardships of life, as Mason, his family and the entire county changes throughout the 2000's. Watching this defenseless tike clad in Dragon Ball Z pajamas suddenly transform into a functioning adult before your eyes is simply mind blowing.

The plot is irreverent. It's just life. Boyhood avoids all the milestone/hallmark moments we've seen in other movies. The awkward first kiss, learning to drive, graduating high school, that's all been done before. Boyhood focuses on the in-between; those fleeting, ephemeral moments that make up most of our real lives. While the plot might not be compelling in a "traditional" sense, the cast deserves some serious accolades. They all invested such huge portions of their lives into this project, as the film's runtime winds down and the years pile up, their attachment to their characters and their legit vulnerability onscreen is uncanny. Patricia Arquette delivers the performance of her career, playing Mason's continually struggling mother. Ethan Hawke and Linklater are just peas and carrots at this point. Watching Hawke slowly transform from the hip weekend dad to full blown middle aged family man was like getting smacked by all three incarnations of Jesse from the Before Sunrise films at once. Of course you can't forget the boy of Boyhood himself, Ellar Coltrane. Although his body [and hairstyles] changes throughout, his remarkably consistent performance never waivers. Somewhere along the way this wide eyed boy obsessed with elves and sorcery becomes an introspective photographer, bent on capturing the magic of everyday life with his camera. Good luck trying to pinpoint when this transformation takes place. Things just happen and time just flies by.

Also, for anyone under 30, Boyhood should prove to be quite the nostalgia trip to the wonderfully strange world of the early millennium. The movie's rockin' zeitgeist soundtrack serves as the film's main demarcation points and really anchors the characters to a specific time. Except for the McCain scene. No music needed there.

In short, this movie is phenomenal and Richard Linklater is unstoppable. Go see it.