I’ve felt fairly comfortable over the last few weeks bandying about the term “masterpiece” like it was commonplace. The reason being: Over the past few weeks I’ve seen both Snowpiercer and Boyhood, and both are nothing short of masterful.
By now you know the premise of Boyhood, and likely the equally interesting tale of how it was made. Chronicling the growth of a boy and his family over roughly twelve years of life, director Richard Linklater actually shot the movie over the course of twelve years, doing about a week of shooting annually with the same cast, and organically developing the directions these characters’ lives would go as the real life actors grew and changed. This technique for crafting a film is bold, committed, unique, and entirely effective.
I won’t write an extensive review here because I encourage you to hear my extended thoughts in a podcast that I recorded with the OneOfUs.net team over on their Highly Suspect Reviews show.
But I will go ahead and run down some observations I took away from the film that clearly place it in masterpiece territory.
For one thing, this is a movie that runs three hours long, and never once bores the audience or feels padded. After all, twelve years of life can’t be easy to condense, but it can’t unfold in real time, either. Linklater does an excellent job of engaging the audience fully over the course of a runtime that would make Michael Bay or Peter Jackson look twice.
The greatest reason the hours just slide away and you get pulled into this tale of growing up in America is the writing. Linklater’s screenplay, apparently developed along with the actors and evolving each year with each new shoot, builds to little mini crescendos as each vignette comes to an end. Patricia Arquette (known only as Mom) tells her young son Mason (Ellar Coltrane) and daughter Samantha (Lorelai Linklater) that they’ll be moving to a new city after we’re introduced to the young characters and the life they are living. Then boom: we flow right into the next year’s shoot, with Mason having aged ever so slightly. Never distracting, and somehow almost thrilling each time it happens, the leaps in time are marked by nothing outside of a natural cut just like one would see in any old film. Only haircuts and music queues (brilliantly chosen to demarcate a certain year or mood or zeitgeist) offer us clues that time has passed.
But the writing isn’t simply great due to the build ups and rhythms of a complicated, unique shoot; the characters are also richly developed and entirely organic-feeling. There are interactions between Ethan Hawke (Dad) and his son that feel like the same kinds of bonding moments we’ve all had with a parental figure or authority figure in our lives. There are conversations that feel like the things you and I talk about every day, but somehow take on an iconic feel here in this endlessly ambitious film.
Also of note is how strong the entire family is and how important each role, not just Mason’s, is to the overall story. It takes a village to raise a child, they say. Patricia Arquette played perhaps my favorite character of the film and her “Mom” is a fully realized human being with goals, faults, and endless energy to love and support her rambunctious kids while simultaneously working to further her own career and better provide a future for her kids.
Anyone who lived through the 2000s, especially those who grew up in America in the same generation as Mason, will likely connect with Boyhood on a visceral level. Anyone who grew up… ever… will also likely find much that resonates with their experiences.
Linklater’s independent spirit allowed him to take a 12 year risk, cut together a three hour film without a bunch of graphic user interfaces explaining what year it is and where we are and how we got there, and craft an uncompromised vision that will be resonating with audiences far longer than the similarly lengthed Summer 2014 abomination Transformers: Age Of Extinction.
Linklater has made a film for the ages. A film about growing up, about family, about America… all while never sounding anywhere near as pretentious as this sentence does. I wholeheartedly recommend audiences of any age honor the 12 long years of work Linklater and his team of actors and collaborators put into crafting this singular masterpiece of American cinema by seeking it out and experiencing Boyhood for themselves.
And I’m Out.
Also: Don’t miss David Delgado’s equally effusive review of the film from its SXSW 2014 screening.
