Richard Linklater enjoys exploring the nooks and crannies of people, delving deep into his characters in a bid to uncover what makes them – what makes all of us – tick. He also really enjoys investigating the concept of time, and how it can warp and mend relationships and memories. His Before Sunrise trilogy encapsulated that beautifully: every nine years or so, his camera checks in on the same couple, to see if they’re still in love, or if they’ve begun to float out of each other’s orbit. The scope, ambition and depth of those three films, however, are dwarfed by his latest effort, a film about a boy that took him and his astonishingly dedicated cast twelve whole years to make. The result is a snapshot of a life, one that practically radiates the hope and heartbreak of being human.
Boyhood opens on a six-year-old Mason (Ellar Coltrane) as he navigates a slightly bumpy road through childhood. His mom Olivia (Patricia Arquette) is struggling to make ends meet after his commitment-shy dad Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) disappears to Alaska. He’s bothered relentlessly by his elder sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter). Together – or not quite together – this family grows older, though not necessarily wiser. Mason and Samantha bond with their new step-siblings. Olivia marries again and goes back to school to earn a degree. Mason’s dad goes through girlfriend after girlfriend until he meets his wife.
Strictly speaking, the film has no plot – or no more plot than any of our lives do. There’s plenty of incident, of course: twelve years’ worth of scenes snuck out of the actors’ lives and schedules. We flit from living room to driveway to diner, a collection of venues that serve as the backdrops for all the moments in these characters’ lives. But these bursts of ordinary life – very few scenes thrum with the urgency typically injected into every beat of a movie – don’t quite make up the kind of plot to which we’re accustomed. It’s why the frequently languid Boyhood can occasionally feel downright lethargic, particularly when Mason hits his teenage years and begins to grow away from his family.
But where Boyhood triumphs is in its uncommon observations about what makes up not merely a childhood, but a life. There are the words adults have forgotten they said that wind up carved in a small boy’s heart. There are small acts of kindness – the grudging easiness that takes ten years to grow between Mason Sr. and Olivia. And there are the tiny acts of violence committed by someone close to you: the little bursts of cruelty dealt out by Mason’s stepfather (Marco Perella), as he keeps losing his daily battle with his inner demons and addictions. Through it all, you realise that – in Mason’s life, as in all of our lives – there are perfectly ordinary, wonderful, hateful moments, people, words, images and ideas that make us who we are.
Boyhood might have fallen apart if its cast weren’t up to the task of telling a lifetime’s worth of stories over twelve years. Imagine if Coltrane had turned out to be a terrible actor a few years down the road! Fortunately, Linklater draws stunningly naturalistic performances from his entire cast. Coltrane, of course, is the film’s fulcrum, and he goes very credibly from the chubby, wide-eyed innocence of boyhood to the lean, tortured doubts of young adulthood. The film also features a pair of raw, beautiful performances from Hawke and Arquette: he finds the bittersweet humanity in a once deadbeat dad who still loves his kids fiercely, and she lends a little grace to Olivia’s never-ending struggle to keep it all together.
Perhaps the greatest testament to the power of Boyhood is the fact that you’re never quite sure when – or how – something in the film will affect you. In this collection of moments, there are sharp, gentle spikes of love and loss, spread across years. They come in Olivia’s search for a partner, or the slow, steady dissipation of Mason Sr.’s dreams to sing for anyone other than his own immediate family. They cluster around stories of whales and fireside chats about Star Wars. Just like the life it depicts, and life itself, Boyhood ebbs and flows, its insights and heart – its joys and tragedies – moulding themselves to each person in the audience, in each moment in time.
Summary: A wise, powerful film as small and as large as life itself.
RATING: 4 out of 5 stars
Shawne Wang