From the archive: "Boyhood"

One of the more unusual and enjoyable aspects of 2003’s broadly conventional School of Rock was Richard Linklater’s direction of his child performers: rather than seeking to set these emergent, inchoate personalities in stone, it instead cleared space around the plot so that they could express themselves as individuals. By the time of 2004’s Before Sunset, a question had apparently set itself in the filmmaker’s mind: what if you kept going back to these kids, to see them growing up, and the world around them being renewed?

There were precedents: Michael Apted’s Up docs, Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel fictions. Yet Linklater’s Boyhood, filmed over twelve years, emerges as closer to the exhaustive naturalism of last year’s Blue is the Warmest Colour. It watches dreamy all-American boy Mason (Eller Coltrane) grow from moptopped ‘tweener to college-aged longhair, while logging a populist history of this century’s first, turbulent years; it whips us from a moment when kids were into The Hives and reliant on lingerie catalogues for their jollies to a point a decade later when it was all Gotye and smartphones. As Mason grows, so we do.

This boy lives with his precocious sister (Lorelei Linklater, a credit to her father) and their self-improving single mother (Patricia Arquette), busy working through her own issues. From time to time, her musician ex, played by Ethan Hawke, will drive by, and anybody unaware of the film’s production history will surely be shocked by how youthful Hawke looks in his first scene: the furrowed brow on show throughout Before Midnight was, around the millennium, but a sporadically concerned ripple.

This is Boyhood’s foremost pleasure: as it shows these people getting heavier, broodier and greasier, freighted with on- and off-screen baggage, it forms an acknowledgement this process happens to us all, even those preserved in the movies. Linklater refuses the usual “two years later” nudges, and has no need for the latex by which performers are traditionally aged; instead, discreet shifts in hairstyle or puppy fat come to indicate plot lacunae.

“Timeline” may, in fact, be more accurate than “plot”. For while Boyhood forms a notable logistical achievement – assembling everybody in the same place every now and again in a spirit of relaxed, cordial collaboration – it’s an even greater feat of editing, and Sandra Adair deserves credit for weighting these scenes from a relatively comfortable middle-class life so as to establish a cumulative sense of something universal. However long Mason might spend staring at the sky, we’re compelled to keep watching until the clouds of adolescence – bullies, bumfluff and all – blow into view.

For all this, Boyhood struck me as an experience more pleasant than profound. The Before series gained from its proximity to characters who’d spent time out in the world, and been buffeted, even wounded by fate; it cut its romantic softness with a degree of astringent experience drawn from its writer-stars’ personal lives. Boyhood, by contrast, never stops looking at Mason fondly, just as Blue is the Warmest Colour was relentless (and, to this viewer, somewhat wearying) in its determination to probe every nook and cranny of its heroine’s existence.

Flatly comic supporting turns breach the prevailing naturalism, and notes of outright fantasy eventually creep in, as though this were any other studio-backed coming-of-ager. While Mason himself remains credibly scrawny and spotty – and it’s a stroke of colossal good fortune on Linklater’s part that Coltrane should have grown up not into Hayden Christensen, but a sensitive, responsive child of his age – it’s a pity his first love should be played by such an obvious producer-approved hottie.

Yet at a time when the American cinema has become obsessed with the young – in part to strongarm the disposable income from their pockets – Linklater has emerged as one of very few directors sincerely, sympathetically analysing their moves and motives: how they think and speak, how they get from there to here. Despite (or possibly because of) its inbuilt hugginess, I suspect Boyhood will stand as a model of big-picture humanist filmmaking, using every last precious one of its 166 minutes to frame a truth as essential as it is simple: time flies, and sometimes the only way to hold onto this stuff is to photograph it.

(MovieMail, July 2014)

Boyhood screens on Channel 4 tonight at 12.05am.