Richard Linklater has done a lot of interesting stuff over the course of his career as a director, but probably the best of what he’s produced so far comes in the form of his Before trilogy—three movies starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy that take place over the course of 18 years. The Before movies are exceptional for two reasons. First of all, they’re famously about little more than people walking together and talking, yet they’re somehow able to not only keep that formula from getting boring, they’re also able to make it downright engaging for the length of three feature-length films. Secondly, because they were able to get the filmmaker and the stars back together for two sequels that each took place nine years apart, they were also able to look at a relationship from a unique perspective as it developed and as the couple naturally aged. We got to see Hawke and Delpy’s faces change and their perspectives change, without the use of phony aging makeup and showy acting meant to project aging, and with the added benefit of the creative forces actually growing in wisdom and skill in between each movie.
Linklater’s new film, Boyhood, is essentially the Before concept on steroids. Everything that was accomplished there is taken a step further and made a step more interesting because of increased ambition. This time around, instead of detailing a relationship as it grows and changes over the course of 18 years, checking in on it a mere three times, Linklater is detailing the entire childhood of a boy named Mason (Ellar Coltrane), from age 5 to age 18, and he’s checking in on his development constantly. To be clear about that, this movie was shot over the course of 12 years, with the actors and the crew getting together every year to shoot a handful of new scenes—which means that you gradually watch all of the actors age 12 years, for real, over the course of the film, including watching the star morph from being a bright-eyed 5-year-old in the opening scene to being a scruffy-faced college freshman in the last. It’s a gimmick that would be worth checking out even if the movie wasn’t really any good, but that’s especially worth checking out because the film is so good that it just may be the new best thing Linklater has ever made.
In addition to the lead character, Mason, the film also focuses quite a bit on his older sister, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), his single mother (Patricia Arquette), who is trying her best to raise a couple of kids that she clearly had before she was ready to be a mother, and their rambling dad (Ethan Hawke), who had kids before he was responsible enough to hold down a job, let alone be a father, and who spends at least the first half of the film being mostly absent. That’s a simple rundown of the characters, and it only really details their situations at the start of the film, because to give too much away about where they go would be a mistake. A huge part of the film’s appeal is how it allows you to get to know the characters and then watch them as they age, growing and changing in some ways, but staying fundamentally themselves in others, like people actually do.
I say that getting to know the characters is a “huge part” of the experience of watching the movie because it doesn’t really tell a story in any traditional sense. There’s no central conflict that’s driving the pacing forward, there’s no three act structure where a character is established, goes through a dramatic experience, and then is changed. This is a look at a boy growing up, plain and simple. You get to see every act of his young life, and the change he goes through is constant.
Chances are good that a story with this little focus or structure could have been a real bore, but Linklater manages to mine so much from the lives of his characters that boredom is never even an issue. In a way, it’s the unavoidable changes that life continually throws our way that become the conflict. We spend so much of our time trying to create existences for ourselves that are solid and stable, and then they get continuously thrown into upheaval by forces that are beyond our control. Traditional stories tend to focus on one big instance of change, but Boyhood has subverted the formula by presenting constant change and making it the protagonist’s task to come to terms with accepting them.
To talk about change more succinctly, the thing that this movie is able to accomplish most completely is to make the audience feel exactly what it’s like to be a young child growing up with young parents who are no longer together. During development, a stable home life is a very precious thing, so to be a child who can have his home, his family, and his daily routine suddenly and consistently uprooted because of the romantic whims of two people in their 20s who are still trying to figure out their owns lives can be a very traumatic thing. Every look, every conversation that the parental figure has with a current or potential romantic partner is loaded with significance and dread. How does a young kid deal with the stress of being told that a stranger is their new “dad?” How many times can they meet a new set of grandparents, or be whisked away to a new neighborhood before it becomes impossible for them to fully develop a sense of self? To refer to single parents dating as being a form of child abuse is melodramatic, to be sure, but there’s no denying that it forces children to attempt to conceptualize the world in adult ways years before they’re actually able to, and this movie does a great job of bringing that struggle to life.
Much like in the Before movies, whatever themes you’re going to identify in Boyhood are going to come from the conversations the characters have together, which tend to be naval gazing affairs that contemplate the universe, our place in it, and whether there’s any meaning to everything. This too is an approach that could have resulted in a pretentious, unwatchable movie, but, once again, Linklater and his players prove to be talented enough to make it all work. The writing here is subtle and authentic enough to avoid giving the parents more wisdom or insight than can be gained from a couple of decades of struggling through mistakes, and it also doesn’t allow the teenage characters any more insight than the juvenile belief that just questioning everything is wisdom enough. These are three dimensional characters with strengths, weaknesses, possibilities, and limitations, and there’s something really beautiful about that.
Of course, with a project that’s this ambitious, there were bound to be a few problems that popped up. Some of the acting can get a bit spotty. Not from the main kids, who are generally strong, or from Arquette and Hawke, who are the veteran acting foundations that everything gets built on top of, but from some of the side characters, who are amateurish to a distracting degree. The problem comes when the kids become teenagers and they start having to have conversations with other young actors, who aren’t as seasoned. The stretch of the movie where awkward acting is taking place doesn’t amount to much run time, but when the rest of the presentation is so realist and authentic, any wooden delivery stands out all the more.
At 164 minutes, Boyhood is a really long movie too. That’s a hard complaint to make, because there isn’t anything in here that isn’t a joy to sit through, but it’s the reality of the situation nonetheless. As we’ve already covered, this movie doesn’t tell a traditional story, so there are a lot of scenes that don’t really push the story forward and that don’t really exist for any reason other than to add color and a little more depth, and a few of them either needed to be truncated or to go completely. This leads to hard decisions, especially when your actors are producing so much good stuff and your movie took so much time and planning to put together, but the length of the film is such that the audience can’t help but start checking their watches periodically during the third act, and the third act of this film is full of some really powerful stuff that deserves to have your full attention. Thinning out the middle of the film a bit would have helped with that.
Boyhood is such a special movie that you’re not going to focus much on that sort of nitpicking though. Even aside from all of the planning and work that went into the concept, it’s still, in its individual moments, dramatically affecting enough to earn your full attention, and entertaining enough that it never feels too heavy or like a homework assignment. Also, it’s simply one of the most relatable and affecting coming of age stories that’s ever been put on the big screen. Linklater has truly outdone himself. If he wasn’t already a future filmmaking legend before this movie came out, he’ll certainly be considered one now.
