Boyhood is a story of growing up as seen through the eyes of a boy named Mason. Snapshots of adolescence from road trips and family dinners to birthdays and graduations and all the moments in between become transcendent, set to a soundtrack spanning the years from Coldplay's Yellow to Arcade Fire's Deep Blue. Boyhood is both a nostalgic time capsule of the recent past and an ode to growing up and parenting. It's impossible to watch Mason and his family without thinking about our own journey.
While everything about Boyhood is done with extraordinary care, the master stroke was clearly the casting, 13 years ago, of a little Texas boy named Ellar Coltrane.
'Boyhood' reveals itself as something deeper, more noteworthy and ambitious than even its remarkable production would suggest, for Linklater has given us nothing less than a cinematic approximation of human memory.
Telling the story of a boy from age 6 to 18, and filmed over that same time, it is a beautiful, poetic journey of life, with all of its ups, its downs, and, of course, everything in-between.
We can quibble with small stuff in Boyhood. Supporting performances are variable, the sister drops out as a dramatic character ... I could go on. But the cumulative power is tremendous.
Linklater's casual hand at storytelling, dealing out reel after reel of naggingly forthright enlightenment, turns this simple tale of a mother trying to do her best into something worth every second of the time it took to produce.
In keeping with Linklater's just-do-it aesthetic, the drama is low-key, the dialogue conversational, the observations of human failings and strengths acute without being censorious, the narrative smooth, and the overall vibe easygoing.
A word about the film's epic length. Boyhood is 166 minutes long. Yet it is so affecting, so much a thing of wonder, that it could run forever and I would still keep watching.
Calling it a sum of its parts can be a backhanded compliment, but it feels like especially worthy praise for Boyhood, considering how much went into making it feel whole.
