If
you come to this 2014 release knowing nothing
about it, you will be confronted with a
surprisingly youthful-looking Ethan Hawke and
Patricia Arquette in the throws of breaking up
their marriage, and you will wonder at either
the terrific make-up job to make them look about
12 years younger than they are, or the reason
why the film was held back for 12 years.
In truth, as anyone who goes to see this
165-minute film surely knows, it was shot over
12 years and portrays the growing-up of a
typical American boy from age 6 to 18, with the
same young actor, Ellar Coltrane,
throughout. His older sister, played by
the director's daughter Lorelei Linklater, ages
similarly.
Boyhood is the second outstanding film in 3
years about a boy growing up in Texas, following
Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Its
originality (not unique, as we have the examples
of Michael Apted's "7-up" etc TV series, and
Truffaut's series of films starring an
ever-ageing Jean-Pierre Leaud, as well as
Linklater's "Before" trilogy starring Hawke and
Julie Delpy) makes it a fascinating observation
of people, particularly children, growing older,
as hairstyles, facial changes, the breaking of
the boy's voice, manifest themselves.
There are also the technological changes, as PCs
give way to laptops and then to tablets and
phones, changes presumably unanticipated when
filming commenced in 2002. There are
references to current events (9/11, the Iraq
war, the Obama election) without prior knowledge
of what followed. There was also the risk
that the two children, so affecting at the
outset, would lose interest and appeal as
filming proceeded through the years, but this
was not to be. Coltrane matures into an
extremely likeable if somewhat shy young man,
while Linklater, obviously with a very close
bond with her director father, is a delightfully
engaging young woman by the end. All four
main actors are superb.
As one would expect, there is no particular
"plot", and the ongoing screenplay was
semi-improvised to take account of the
children's changing interests as they grew
older; for example, Coltrane developed an
interest in photography, which was incorporated
into the character. Arquette, as the
mother, endures a series of unhappy
relationships, including with a man who from the
outset is clearly a rather nasty
character. And the film's ending, somewhat
reminiscent of the ending of Eric Rohmer's The
Green Ray, may leave some viewers asking "so
what happened next?"
Like other near-3 hour films I have seen, this
seemed much shorter than many 90-minute
ones. I think Boyhood will win not just
critical acclaim, but possibly a clutch of
Oscars also. Highly recommended.
