Boyhood (2014)
- Jul 10, 2014
- 2 min read
Directed by: Richard Linklater
Starring: Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke,
Premièred in 2014 at the Sundance Film Festival, released in the UK on July 11th 2014.
Following Mason (Coltrane) as he grows up from a six-year-old boy to an eighteen-year-old going off to college, Boyhood is a non-conventional film that has a very disjointed storyline, allowing the audience to dip into his life for a short period of time each year while tackling various subjects from moving house, to domestic violence, to a growing feeling of alienation towards your family.
Despite being mostly critically acclaimed, a lot of people seem to find themselves bored and confused by the unusual storyline and how so many things aren't directly explained. While it can be argued that there is no real plot as we are simply watching this boy and his family grow up, the film acknowledges that that growth doesn't stop just because we're not looking. While the lack of explanation in any other film would be classed as bad writing, here the director is trying to encourage the audience to fill in the spaces. To come to their own conclusions based on the stops that are made, encouraging us to pay attention to everything as opposed to letting it simply wash over us. We either fill in the gaps for ourselves or accept that a lot can happen within a year.
Whether you can keep up with the storyline or not, it can't be denied that what Linklater is trying to do here is inventive and ambitious. Given that he was working with actors who were aging naturally within the film, there was no chance for redos beyond the few days they had each year to film the footage. The script, though needing to be malleable to fit the times as they changed, still could not be differed from too much. New ideas couldn't be brought in as there was no foundation to build on and no means of going back to place it.
Personally, I came out of the film shaken over how much of my own childhood I recognised on screen. Nothing was an exact like-for-like but words, emotions, feelings, and situations that resonated were all there. It was a chilling experience, almost like reliving some of my own childhood while learning about this boy.
Despite the majority of the film resting on the shoulders of Coltrane, he was magnificently supported by the regular cast with Arquette as his mother, Hawke as his father, and the director's own daughter, Lorelei Linklater filling the role of Mason's older sister, Samantha. She transitions perfectly from bratty, little girl, into a bratty older girl, before eventually mellowing out, and having the majority of the best lines in the film.
The one thing it needs is a better transition between the year changes as there is little to distinct one period from another leading to more than once staring at one of the main cast wondering who on earth they are.
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