Richard Linklater's "Boyhood," a nearly three-hour-long drama following the life of Mason Evans Jr. as he evolves from being a cute, quiet six-year-old into a man of his own, is this year's winner for Best Drama Motion Picture at the Golden Globe Awards. The film has also been nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director.
But even before the film snagged the top award at the recent awards ceremonies, "Boyhood" has quickly become a film buff's favorite after premiering at the Sundance Festival in 2014.
The film's hook may sound gimmicky, but for all intents and purposes, it is effective. In "Boyhood," Linklater follows the life of Mason, who is played all throughout the movie by Ellar Coltrane, who we see literally grow up on screen as the film passes through the moments, big and small - but mostly small - that shape Mason into the 18-year-old young man that he becomes by the end of the film.
It was a leap of faith for Linklater, who took 39 days over a span of 12 years shooting the film. No director could have easily placed his faith in the talent of then seven-year-old Coltrane, the home-schooled son of Austin artists who, luckily for Linklater, grew up to play a handsome, moody young man with a penchant for photography.
"Linklater couldn't have known where 12 years of shooting this story would lead," writes Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times. She says we are "blessed" that the filmmaker was steadfast in his faith in what was only a side project of his "because it has resulted in an extraordinarily intimate portrait of a life unfolding and an exceptional, unconventional film in which not much else occurs. Never has so little meant more."
Though the film is categorized as a drama, it doesn't have the tear-jerkers and overly dramatic scenes in the typical drama. Most of the events in Mason's life aren't what one would normally consider worth making a movie of. Like many people, perhaps like you, he goes through a childhood marked by divorce, gets bullied at his new school, and gets his first taste of heartbreak. There are no deaths, accidents, or shocking life events that lead to the characters' inevitable affirmation of their lives.
"Mason's life has its difficulties but few extremities; it unfolds rather than exploding in reality TV's manufactured traumas," says Time's Richard Corliss. "To sit through 'Boyhood' is to page through a family album of folks you just met, yet feel you've known forever. Each picture tells a poignant story."
There is one part in the film where Patricia Arquette's Olivia, Mason's mother, realizes she married an alcoholic professor that turned out to have issues with anger. There are no violent fights or confrontations, she packs up her bags and leaves with her kids. The drunken stepfather drops off from Mason's life and never shows up again, just as some people do in our own lives.
"Eschewing melodrama and farce, Linklater approaches all these subjects and many others in the same straightforward, unblinking manner, as parts of the grand fabric of life," says Todd McCarthy of Hollywood Reporter. "What seem like huge issues for a moment can often be quickly forgotten, while tiny incidents can remain in the mind forever."
These little moments McCarthy refers to are many, and as Robbie Collin of the Telegraph says, "the meanings of these scenes accrue slowly, like scuffs on shoes." When Mason's sister, Samantha, played by the director's daughter Lorelei Linklater, is clearly embarrassed about her father's (Ethan Hawke) inquiry into her love life; when a young Mason watches through the windshield as his best friend grows smaller and his mother drives him and his sister to a new town; when he receives a note from a girl at school who thinks his crew cut is "kewl"; when Olivia reads a 'Harry Potter' novel to the kids; when Samantha tries to entertain (or annoy) her brother with her dancing to Britney Spears' "Oops... I Did It Again"; and when Mason Sr. pops back into the children's lives for bowling and junk food.
"By the film's end, you realize that what you've experienced, more or less, is what each of us amounts to: a string of moments lived through in a perpetually vanishing present," Collin says.
Much as the film is about Mason's boyhood, it is also about the lives of his and his sister's parents, who, throughout the length of the film and throughout Mason and Sam's growing-up years, experience growth as their children do.
"These aren't movie parents with formulaic arcs and storybook solutions, but characters whose honest, raw hurt and moments of casual grace carry the shock of the real," New York Times Manohla Dargis says. "These are people you know, maybe people like you."
But perhaps more than boyhood and parenthood, beyond the surface, "Boyhood" is a story about time. The film never explicitly makes distinctions between the periods in Mason's life, and it is depicted in how Linklater transitions from one scene to the next. One moment, we see Mason walking down a hallway. When he turns the corner, we realize he's grown a few years older. The technique works, especially as Linklater uses a wealth of telling details, such as Mason Sr.'s facial hair, a midnight release for the sixth 'Harry Potter' book, and the election of Obama in 2008, to show viewers exactly where in time they are.
At the end of the film, where Mason goes hiking with college friends, they talk about seizing the moment because it is never coming back, but Mason says "the moment seizes us."
New York Times' Dargis put it simply when she said, instead of trying to "counter the passage of time and the inevitable decay it brings," Linklater's "Boyhood" "captures moments in time and relinquishes them as he moves from year to year. He isn't fighting time but embracing it in all its glorious and agonizingly fleeting beauty."
And isn't that what we're supposed to do with life? After all, it is simply a series of passing moments that we can't fight or forever hold on to but can only cherish and let go of as the moments go by.
