It’s doing Boyhood more than a little bit of a disservice to, less than an hour after seeing it, try and sum up in 10 minutes what Richard Linklater has spent 12 years making. We can probably save time by dispensing with the superlatives, seeing as there really aren’t any left that one critic or another hasn’t used to praise the film. They don’t really apply to Boyhood as a film anyway, seeing as watching it is as unique an experience as its production.
Over the last twelve years, Linklater has been filming a coming of age story for a character named Mason, played Ellar Coltrane, who was seven when the project started in 2002. Along with Patricia Arquette, Linklater’s own daughter Lorelei, and Linklater-insert Ethan Hawke, the director has been tracking Coltrane as he ages from a first-grader to a college freshman, checking in every year to see how the kid, the music, the politics, and the culture from Texas have changed over the course of more than a decade.
“Ambitious,” is usually the first word that comes to mind when you hear the pitch, but Boyhood, in being a time-lapse of a boy’s journey into adulthood, isn’t really anything more than its gimmick. That’s not an insult: this is a film where the passage of time is the only real thing that happens. Mason’s family goes through the same wealth of ups and downs as any other’s would over such a long period of time, but the movie is never driving at any point in particular. Hell, the biggest misconception one goes in with is assuming this is even Mason’s story. The more accurate, already taken original title of 12 Years better encapsulates what we’re watching for 160-minute runtime, especially since Mason himself is really just an observer for much of it.
Unlike most avant-garde cinema that demands the viewer get out what they put into it, Boyhood’s power lies in what you bring with you to the experience. I’m barely more than a half-decade older than Coltrane, so while his on-the-move childhood caused by divorced certainly spoke to my own personal history, it was the middle years of the film that spoke to me most strongly, as they coincided with the time in my life that were most individually formative. There are universal qualities to Mason’s formative years growing up, increasingly so as he gets older, and the story becomes more singularly his, but his life is as random and unspectacular as anyone else’s in its own way.
That’s one way of saying that Boyhood’s shaggy free-form approach can grow a little exhausting over its stretch, but such is life. As the film nears its end, Mason and his college friends bond over a shared question of “what it’s all about,” reworking some famous aphorisms to try and reveal a truer meaning. They not so inadvertantly form what could be a thesis statement for the film, one Linklater and Mason know is just absurd, so they laugh it off. How can you sum up life in a three-hour film, let alone a sentence? You can’t, so don’t worry about trying. Just sit back, and try to enjoy yourself, because no matter what, Boyhood is going to speak to you in someway. Linklater, as always, is just a superb conversationalist with a movie camera, and he shows with Boyhood, as he has before, that time is the only real lingua franca there is.