Boyhood

Director: Richard Linklater
Screenplay: Richard Linklater
Stars: Ellar Coltrane (Mason), Patricia Arquette (Mom), Ethan Hawke (Dad), Elijah Smith (Tommy), Lorelei Linklater (Samantha), Steven Prince (Ted), Bonnie Cross (Teacher), Libby Villari (Grandma), Marco Perella (Professor Bill Welbrock), Jamie Howard (Mindy), Andrew Villarreal (Randy)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2014
Country: U.S.
Boyhood Criterion Collection Blu-ray
BoyhoodRichard Linklater’s Boyhood is the greatest gimmick film since Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2001) precisely because its gimmick—in this case, shooting the film little bits at a time over 12 years so that the actors naturally age on screen—doesn’t feel gimmicky at all, but rather like a fundamentally organic part of the creative process. In other words—and this is the highest compliment I can pay the film—I can’t imagine Boyhood having been made any other way, and I doubt that there will be another film like it any time soon. The closest cinematic equivalent would have to be François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series, which tracked the fictive titular character as he grew from a romantic-rebellious adolescent into a settled adult over the course of five films in 20 years (1959–1979). However, Boyhood’s condensation of that emotional experience into a single 162-minute experience marks it as something fundamentally different and, in some ways, even more compelling. It is truly unique.

Linklater, who has already explored cinematically rendering the passage of time in his Before trilogy (1995, 2004, 2013), merges that interest with his natural proclivity toward capturing the rich details of life and the natural flow of conversation. In many ways, Boyhood merges the best aspects of his previous films: the sharp eye for detail and understanding of adolescent rituals he showcased in his last-day-of-school dramedy Dazed and Confused (1993), the richness of dialogue he displayed in his indie debut Slacker (1991) and the Before trilogy, the philosophical depth of his animation experiment Waking Life (2000), and the concomitant humor and tenderness he brought to bear on the awkwardness of childhood in School of Rock (2003)—both literal childhood and arrested development, which are equally central to Boyhood.

The film’s protagonist is Mason (Ellar Coltrane), who we first meet as a thoughtful, somewhat rebellious six-year-old living with his single mom (Patricia Arquette) and his older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter). Over the course of the next dozen years, we watch as Mason grows and matures into a college-bound young man against a backdrop of both the mundane rituals of life in middle America (family dinners, riding bikes with friends, going to school with a new haircut, etc.) and the upheavals and pains of moving cities, marital strife, and adolescent bullying, although the driving dramatic force is Mason finding his own sense of self. In this regard, Boyhood is a fundamentally philosophical film, one whose primary interest is in the heart and mind of its always growing and changing central character, whose left-of-center sensibilities and refusal to join the mainstream will certainly be familiar to fans of Linklater’s other films, almost all of which celebrate outsiders who are committed to their inner worlds.

Mason and Samantha spend most of their time with their mom, although the largely absent dad (Ethan Hawke), a rootless young man who wants to make it as a musician but is mostly just aimless, shows up at regular intervals. In a sense, Boyhood is as much about Mason’s dad as it is about Mason, as Hawke’s character goes through the film’s most radical maturation, morphing from a quintessential slacker suffering a long-term case of arrested development into a respectable family man who trades in his impractical Pontiac GTO for a—shudder of shudders—minivan. What Linklater does so beautifully in the film is convey the manner in which this ever-changing father figure always has something to impart to his son, even when his own life seems in desperate need of mooring. Through the ups and downs, the center of the film is anchored by the simple fact that Mason’s parents love him and his sister and do the best they can to raise them, even when they’re making their own mistakes or grappling desperately with their own confused sense of self. (If I have one gripe about the film, it is that Arquette’s mother character gets somewhat short-changed despite having the most screen time, especially near the end when she is left in a moment of emotional crisis without any kind of resolution. This is not to say that she needs a resolution—this is not the kind of film that is about easy answers and tidy closures, but it still feels a bit hard-edged, especially because the film is otherwise inherently optimistic about life and its attendant struggles.)

Linklater wisely downplays Boyhood’s headline-grabbing time-lapse structure; not once do we get a title card telling us the year or even a direct indication that a large chunk of time has passed. Rather, one year flows unannounced into the next, and it takes a moment or two before we even register that we have leaped 12 months ahead, usually when we see that Mason’s face is a little less boyishly round or notice that his hair is demonstrably longer or shorter. Because, like many of Linklater’s best films, Boyhood is about life in the raw, it lacks a conventional narrative arc, instead relying on the inherent fascination of day-to-day experience punctuated with all the ups and downs of life. The film’s most overtly dramatic moments revolve around the mother’s second marriage to a psychology professor (Marco Perella) who turns out to be an abusive alcoholic, but even here Linklater downplays the typical melodrama by focusing instead on the incremental ways in which the stepfather’s emotional and later physical violence evolves and reveals itself.

Thus, the film both rewards and challenges our expectations of a coming-of-age narrative, delivering a portrait of growing up that is both poignant and poetic. Shooting the film over a dozen years is a gimmick, no doubt, but it delivers precisely what Linklater had theorized it would by transforming our experience of a familiar narrative in ways that defy simple description. Boyhood is a film that has to be experienced to be believed.

Boyhood Criterion Collection Director-Approved Two-Disc Blu-ray Set

Aspect Ratio1.85:1
AudioEnglish DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround
SubtitlesEnglish
Supplements
  • Audio commentary by writer/director Richard Linklater and nine members of the film’s cast and crew
  • Twelve Years documentary chronicling the film’s production, featuring footage shot over the course of its twelve years
  • “Memories of the Present” video discussion featuring Linklater and actors Patricia Arquette and Ellar Coltrane, moderated by producer John Pierson
  • “Always Now” video conversation between Coltrane and actor Ethan Hawke
  • “Time of Your Life” video essay by critic Michael Koresky about time in Linklater’s films, narrated by Coltrane
  • “Through the Years” collection of portraits of the cast and crew by photographer Matt Lankes, narrated with personal thoughts from Linklater, Arquette, Hawke, Coltrane, and producer Cathleen Sutherland
  • Essay by novelist Jonathan Lethem
  • DistributorThe Criterion Collection
    SRP$39.99
    Release DateOctober 11, 2016

    VIDEO
    It has been less than two years since Paramount first released Boyhood on Blu-ray. However, it was reported that Paramount would not be collaborating with Criterion on this subsequent release, so the transfer here is, as advertised, completely new and different from the earlier disc, although I don’t think there are any major differences. Recognizing that digital technologies would evolve and change over the course of the film’s dozen years of production, writer/director Richard Linklater wisely chose to go with 35mm celluloid, thus ensuring a visual consistency in the finished product despite the large temporal gap between the first and last shots. Criterion’s transfer, like Paramount’s before, does a nice job of presenting the film’s varied visuals, which range from mundane interiors, to sunny streets, to an impressive canyon in South Texas. The image, which was transferred from the original 35mm camera negative, is sharp, but not overly sharp, which allows detail to emerge without looking too digital-y. Colors are warm and natural, and there is a fine layer of grain to indicate the film’s celluloid origins. The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1-channel surround soundtrack also does good work, giving us clean dialogue and functional ambient effects to draw us into the environments. Nothing whiz-bang going on aurally, although the way the surrounds and the volume kicks in when the soundtrack shifts to rock music reminds us of how important popular music is to Linklater’s films.
    SUPPLEMENTS
    Criterion’s disc boasts a number of new supplements—enough, in fact, that most of them appear on a separate Blu-ray. The film features a newly recorded audio commentary by writer/director Richard Linklater and nine members of the film’s cast and crew: producer Cathleen Sutherland, editor Sandra Adair, co-producer and first assistant director Vince Palmo Jr., production designer Rodney Becker, costume designer Kari Perkins, casting director Beth Sepko-Lindsey, and actors Marco Perella, Libby Villari, and Andrew Villarreal. Not all of the contributors were recorded together—some were, some weren’t—but it is well edited together in a way that gives you an expansive overview of virtually every fact of the film’s unique production (having that many contributors makes it relatively easy to fill nearly three hours of running time). If you noticed the conspicuous absence of the film’s main cast members on the commentary, don’t worry—they have starring roles in some of the supplements on the other disc. The second disc opens with Twelve Years (which, incidentally, was the film’s intended title before 12 Years a Slave was set for release the same year), a 49-minute documentary that chronicles the film’s production over the course of its dozen years. It is essentially a much longer version of the featurette included on Paramount’s Blu-ray, and it includes copious behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with Linklater and stars Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, and Lorelei Linklater at different points in the film’s production (interestingly, Linklater and his cast often interview each other). There are also two new video interview segments: “Memories of the Present,” which features a recent discussion among Linklater, Arquette, and Coltrane that is moderated by producer John Pierson (57 min.) and “Always Now,” a conversation between Coltrane and Hawke (30 min.). “Time of Your Life” is a 12-minute video essay by critic Michael Koresky that is narrated by Coltrane. It focuses primarily on Linklater’s obsession with the passage of time in his films and compares its depiction in Boyhood to his previous works, including You Can’t Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988), Slacker (1991), Dazed and Confused (1993), and the Before trilogy (1995, 2004, 2013). Finally, the disc includes “Through the Years,” a fascinating collection of portraits of the cast and crew by photographer Matt Lankes, which is narrated with personal thoughts from Linklater, Arquette, Hawke, Coltrane, and producer Cathleen Sutherland. The only thing missing from the Paramount disc is the 52-minute Q&A with Linklater and his cast that was recorded in June 2014 after a screening of the film at the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles.

    Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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    All images copyright © The Criterion Collection / IFC Films

    Overall Rating: (4)




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