Now in Theaters: Boyhood

Title: Boyhood
Director: Richard Linklater
My Overall Rating: 5 stars out of 5

via Wikipedia

Boyhood is an extremely ambitious film.  Richard Linklater filmed the same cast intermittently over a twelve-year period, following a family as the kids grow up, primarily Mason Evans, Jr. (performed by Ellar Coltrane).  Mason is six years old at the tale's beginning and it ends with his first day at college.  Mom (Patricia Arquette) and Dad (Ethan Hawke) have split and Mason and his older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director's daughter) live with their mother.  The family lives through remarriages (good for Dad, disastrous for Mom), moves, school bullies, new careers and teenage romance.

It's the sort of movie that stays with you. My Wife and I went to see it on Saturday afternoon and I've been thinking about it ever since.  Unfortunately, it also means I've had Coldplay's "Yellow" going through my head but even that hasn't ruined the film for me.  It's excellent and there are so many reasons why.  The actors are all wonderful, especially Arquette.  The children are entirely believable.  The time passage is never marked - "Four Years Later" and such.  Suddenly the kids are older and the story moves on.  There are so many paths the movie could have followed more deeply: alcoholic stepfathers, teen drug use, etc.  But that's not really the point.  Mason's life, his boyhood, is made up of smatterings of all those things.  Not all is bad, either.  Dad gets his life together.  Both kids find good friends.  Both go to college.  The story encapsulates a 360-degree view of childhood, neither sugar-coated nor the opposite.

I hope this movie will be remembered come Oscar time.  Filming the story over such a long period surely involved risk but it's no mere gimmick.  There's not a whiff of pretense.  Arquette, in particular, definitely deserves a nomination.