Richard Linklater’s revolutionary epic ode to coming-of-age pushes the boundaries of all the conventions that we had come so used to associating with film. Films have traditionally served as an escape from the dreary bleakness of everyday life.
They are contemporary statues, meant to hold their place in time and offer movie-goers a temporary glance, or outlet if you will, into a life that is completely and utterly different from their own.
Movies are traditionally meant to excite us, to stimulate us, to take us on a wild roller coaster ride of an adventure that we wouldn’t actually be able to experience in real life.
In Boyhood, (2014) Linklater does the exact opposite of offer us an outlet. He essentially holds up a gigantic mirror in front of the audience and forces each viewer to empathize and relate to a part of the saga that is boyhood — or childhood, rather — in his or her own unique way. Boyhood is a film that is twelve years in the making. It is a journey that spans the ever-elusive component of time and ultimately serves to beckon that there is in fact an infinite amount of beauty in the mundane.
Linklater is the kind of guy who likes to breathe out. His previous films, including Dazed and Confused (1993) and Before Sunrise (1995), have often been slow-paced, focusing and reflecting on the quotidian details of our lives that nearly all of us take for granted.
Linklater’s films have a very pre-deterministic sort of feel; there is a great sense of cosmic comfort that pervades through his films, a sense of existential lightness that soothes your soul like a ripple across the river on a cool Austin morning before the sun has risen.
Boyhood is an emotionally exhausting journey in which both nothing and everything happen simultaneously. The film follows Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from his bright-eyed days as a kindergartener all the way through his angsty departure to college.
His mother (Patricia Arquette) is an indomitable single mom who is just trying to give her children a better life, while the father (Ethan Hawke) plays an affable sweetheart who just could never quite get it together. The daughter (played by Linklater’s own daughter Lorelei) is vibrant at first but tapers off towards her teenage years.
One moment that perfectly highlights this perspective of finding beauty all around us is an early interaction between a 10-year old Mason and his dad.
Mason is staying at his father’s skuzzy apartment; they are sleeping on couches in the living room as Samantha (Linklater) sleeps on the sole bed. As Mason and his father lay on their backs staring at the ceiling, Mason asks, “Dad, there’s no real magic in the world, right? Like, this second, there’s no elves in the world, right?” Hakwe responds with another question.
He asks Mason if he told him that there was an enormous creature that lived below the sea, weighed thousands of pounds and breathed water, (i.e. a whale), would he believe it was magical? While there are technically no elves in the world, we don’t need to look far to find magic; it surrounds us constantly.
Boyhood is not a particularly exciting film. It won’t make your pulse jump, but it might make you shed a tear. It is about appreciating the humdrum moments that slowly coalesce to form a life lived. While the film feels aimless at times and could be said to lack an overall direction, Boyhood is a poignant trip that is as innovative as it is nostalgic. At a certain point it becomes hard to distinguish between life on the screen and off.
