Beastly Reviews: Boyhood

This movie took twelve years to make.

You've never seen a film like Boyhood. No one has, and I doubt anyone will again. Released in July, Richard Linklater's new film is a coming-of-age story and soaring cinematic experiment.

The film took twelve years to make. The same actors play the same roles, aging naturally on screen.

Mirroring the piecemeal way the film was shot, Linklater weaves a narrative that feels somewhat like a string of home video recordings thrown together. We follow one boy, Mason, from ages five to eighteen. With no voice-over narration, we are simply observers watching him grow. Interestingly, the original actors cast when the film started shooting have not been seen on the big screen in a while (the film is a nice return for Ethan Hawke). Even the picture quality changes — film technology advanced since the project started — and the editing style of the film's second half differs from the first.

I feared the whole thing would be too caught up in what it's trying to be to have a resonating emotional impact. I was wrong. Mason, played for twelve years by Ellar Coltrane, grows into a sensitive, artistic, detached boy on the cusp of manhood. We follow him through his growth into a sensitive and misunderstood young man.

The most dynamic character of the film is Mason's mother, played by Patricia Arquette, who deserves an Oscar nod for the role.

In his teens, where the film closes, Mason's sexual orientation remains ambiguous. We assume he's straight, or at least bisexual, until some parting looks and purple nail polish challenge that. The boy grows into a young man, wiry and intense. The film avoids classifying him as gay or straight and instead focuses on his disillusionment, his distance from his family, and his need to escape.

Yes, there are imperfections. It's hard to get believable performances from child actors. In Mason's early teenage years, several of his friends are preteen caricatures and the film goes flat. But Boyhood eventually succeeds as an intimate study of change, an experiment I enjoyed seeing play out. It shows not only how a character can grow, but how an actor can too — how an actor can get better (or worse) at acting and evolve with a character in real-time. By its end, the characters are fully embodied — the actors have had more than a decade to live in them. No one feels underdeveloped or lost. The aging is real, not makeup. Boyhood is a feat of moviemaking that manages to preserve its heart, its emotional pull, throughout.

Love, Beastly

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