Boyhood (2014)

Boyhood (R) - Review

"Years pass like seconds, minutes like hours"

A boy and his family grow up, through thick and thin, through 12 years of life in Texas in Director Richard Linklater's newest experimental film in long-distance filmmaking, the first real time coming of age picture

Actually spanning these years, watching an actor grow from childhood to adulthood onscreen in accelerated real-time as his family also grows and morphs, is a fascinating exercise in spatial filmmaking; joining up year after year (the music and styles and car-fads are the only clue what year the characters are living in at the moment, which zoom forward without provocation).  It's a video diary of a generation, the post 9-11 children and their families, ups and downs, divorces and new found loves zipping by as the hairstyles go from mullets/Biebers/Emo/to Hipsters.

However, the necessarily amateur acting detracts from the believability, having child actors that grow into adult actors that can never quite act hurts the suspension of crucial disbelief.  The start of the film has some tense moments with a drunk stepdad or family fights, but about half-way through the film all the characters settle down into this tepid groove of suburban life that, while may be real, is not very absorbing.  The boy of the title, Mason, is the kind of sullen eyed aimless kid who won't tear himself away from a game screen for half a second to say hello, the kind of child we've all met and felt a little slighted by.  His sister is a charming goof, his dad (Ethan Hawk) is a tousled hair loser, his mom a caring overstressed hen (Patricia Arquette).  The family dynamic itself is interesting, yet they all surround a kid who is very unrelateable and, dare we say, almost unlikable?  And at nearly 3 hours, Boyhood may invoke a feeling of family just at it's sheer length of exposure you are inflicted to, like a distant relative whose opinion is ignored off hand: "No Mason, why would you gauge your ears, do you know what you'd look like when you're 80?"  He shrugs, digs out cereal bowl.

Boyhood (which is a bit of a misnomer considering the other characters get almost as much screen time as Mason, or at least are more interesting) feels like some of the other nostalgia pieces of Linklater's, whether it's the Austin Weirdness of Slacker or the High School weed-glow in Dazed and Confused.  Some of it seems rewrtitten from these other movies, the underage drinking and drug use are such low hanging fruit that they feel out of place here, not every generation is doomed to repeat the previous' fun and mayhem, and not every kid will take a nip from a flask if asked to.  The only difference here is that Richard isn't that personally nostalgic about the Iraq War, or Honda MiniVans or Game Boy Advances, and it shows.  Stapling these emotions from his 70s boyhood has a false feeling of disjointedness to the millennial events, and while literally watching a kid grow up from 6 to 18 is a fascinating experience, the film itself, the entertainment value, is the same as watching a strangers home movies without anyone to answer your questions, "Aren't these kids cute but where are they living now, that must be his uncle I guess, when did she start dating him, seriously there is a whole other hour left on the tape???"  There are whole 15 minute scenes that seem superfluous,  and when your movie is a nearly 3 hour long family drama one could think it's runtime very excessive.

Narrative-wise, fun-wise, script-wise, acting-wise, it's not Linklater's best by a long shot (and he has done great before).  Concept wise, it being a literal time-lapse photograph of a human being, like a stretched out youtube vid of the picture a month variety (turned into a scene a year in Boyhood), is fantastic and it's execution remarkable (that Linklater had to leave provisions for the film to be finished in the event of his untimely death speaks volumes about the commitment and energy of all involved).  Unfortunately the mundane plot, length per entertainment value and overall distance of emotion left us with a dissenting opinion that unlike our own sunbeam dreanched childhood, this is something we won't be reminiscing about anytime soon.

6 Watching Human Grass Grow out of 10 (GOOD)