Richard Linklater is, far and away, one of the greatest directors working today. He's a man of no small ambition who seems to effortlessly generate grand works of art that imperceptibly illustrate the passage of time and our place in the universe. His Before trilogy, about two lovers (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who co-wrote those movies) we check in on every 9 years, is one of the most epic love stories ever written. And his Waking Life (2001) is an interesting meditation on life, if not about much else.
But he's also a skilled director of clichéd films, most notably The School of Rock (2003), an all accounts by-the-numbers story of kids defying rigid standards with the help of their goofy teacher. It shouldn't work, but dammit, when the kids perform on stage at the end, you love that the parents are there to see how talented their youngsters are. Clichés exist for a reason: they work. It just takes talented individuals to pull them off.
So it is that Boyhood is both conventional and unconventional, in ways a weird summary of everything Linklater's made, his magnum opus. It is quite simply about adolescence, but as you probably no doubt know by now, it is also a film of grand ambition that began production in 2002 and finished last fall. Each year Linklater would convene with his four lead actors, Hawke, Patricia Arquette, Lorelei Linklater (his daughter), and the star of the film, Ellar Coltrane. Linklater's plan was to make a 15-minute short film every year and compile it together to paint the picture of a young man growing up.
The film features some standards of adolescent films: the father (Hawke) is a drifter, divorced from the mother (Arquette) and maintaining the role of man child, the cool one who shows up in a GTO infrequently to grant his kids respite from their lives. The young boy, Mason, has to deal with his mother's continuously poor choices in men, drunks who wonder why he grows his hair long, gets his ears pierced, or paints his nails.
But besides a few events, there actually isn't much that happens here outside of the aging conceit. Linklater avoids all the "big" moments of adolescence, from the first kiss, loss of virginity, and first car. The film plows through the years without much notice, signaling you to the passage of time by using pop songs and devices like an xBox or Wii. Until Mason hits his teenage years, most of the time jumps are nearly imperceptible.
If anything, I think no film can more closely replicate what its like to watch your child grow up. Mason and his sister Samantha are not our children, but halfway through the film, when Mason and Samantha are teenagers, you miss the young, innocent, rambunctious children they started out as. And when High School graduation time happens (one of the few benchmarks of growing up the movie observes), you feel a little choked up as the main characters gather and say a few words.
And its not just the kids growing up that gets you; Hawke and Arquette begin the film at ages 31 and 34, respectively, and end the film at ages 42 and 46. Adults don't change as noticeably as children over the same period of time, but there is a marked difference in the appearance of the actors from the beginning of the film to the end of it. And side characters are established and then brought back later without much fanfare: Arquette has a friend who gets her out of a sticky situation that I was sure showed up again at the end. And the film contains a remarkable moment when one character inspires someone we have just met, who four years later reappears, grateful for the motivation. It's a moment that by all accounts is pretty cheesy, but works because you realize there was a four year gap between the filming of those scenes.
Ultimately, what Linklater and his cast and crew have done is make a capsule of what it is like to grow up. We all don't take the same path, but the results are the same: eventually we leave the nest and adventure out on our own. This, of course, is not the only film of its kind; Michael Apted's Up Series has been checking in with the same group of kids since 1964 every seven years (one assumes most of the subjects will outlive the filmmaker). The Harry Potter series maintained the same core cast, save one death, for ten years (it may be no coincidence Boyhood began production soon after the first of the Potter films, and indeed the launch of the sixth book is featured in one passage). And Francois Truffaut made a series of films, beginning with The 400 Blows (1959) that followed the same character, played by the same actor, through life and love, marriage and adulthood.
But Linklater's ambition, along with Apted and Truffaut, stands out in cinema. It takes true audacity to make a film over the course of 12 years, and the fact that all members survived production and stayed with the film (Linklater's daughter at one point expressed a desire to be killed off a couple of years in, but he refused) is a miracle. That the final product is universally loved is astounding. The fact that it lives up the hype is immeasurable.
