Boyhood (2014)

Most coming-of-age films mimic the passage of time with makeup and different actors. Boyhood refuses that approach entirely. Richard Linklater shot a little at a time over a full twelve years with the same actors. So the boy growing up on screen is not a performance but the real thing. We watch the genuine change of a single child from age six to eighteen unfold within 165 minutes. My rating is ★4.0.

What it’s about — Daily life flowing on without dramatic events

At the center of the story is a boy named Mason. The film follows him from elementary school all the way to the moment he enters college. Divorced parents, residences that change several times over, stepfathers who arrive and depart, a first love and a parting. There is almost nothing in Mason’s life that could be called a dramatic event. The ordinary daily life everyone goes through simply flows by.

And yet it is precisely that ordinariness that makes this film special. Boyhood shows that a person is made not by life’s decisive moments but by the trivial stretches of time in between. There is no grand lesson and no tidy ending. The film simply, quietly reflects life flowing on.

Direction — An experiment in record that captured twelve real years

Linklater’s greatest challenge is the twelve years of time itself. Shooting only a few days each year, he captured the actors actually aging on film. When scenes transition, no caption tells you the year. Instead, through changing hairstyles, growing height, and shifting trends in music and phones, the audience naturally senses that time has passed.

This natural flow of time carries a weight of truth that no other technique could imitate. As we watch Mason grow, we simultaneously watch his parents age. This is not simply the story of one boy but the portrait of an entire family standing before time. This attempt, closer to record than to direction, is a rare experiment in the history of cinema.

Performance — A personality forming alongside the actor

Ellar Coltrane was cast at six and grew up with the film. The change he shows in Mason is, before any judgment of acting skill, marvelous in itself. We are, in effect, watching one person’s character form in real time. The detached yet sensitive expression of the adolescent Mason in the back half is especially striking.

The two actors playing the parents cannot be left out. Patricia Arquette renders in depth the weariness and love of a mother who struggles to raise her children alone, winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Ethan Hawke expresses, with natural charm, a father who is unreliable at first but matures with the years. The rapport of actors who spent twelve years together holds a depth that nothing could replace.

What the film says — Life is nothing but a succession of moments

Boyhood is a film about time. Near its end, the scene in which Mason’s mother breaks down, saying life is nothing but a succession of moments, is the essence of this work. We always wait for a meaningful moment, but life itself is filled with the time between those waitings. The film engraves onto the screen, almost like magic, the nature of time flowing past beyond our grasp.

Ratings & reception

The IMDb rating is 7.9 out of 10. The Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer is 97 percent, earning overwhelming critical acclaim, and the Metacritic score recorded a rare perfect 100 out of 100. At the 87th Academy Awards, Patricia Arquette won Best Supporting Actress, and the film was nominated in six categories including Best Picture. On the strength of its unprecedented twelve-year production method alone, it is regarded as a work that will long endure in film history.

Verdict

That there is no distinct event across a long 165 minutes may strike some as tedious. Boyhood is not a film for viewers who want a fast pace or intense stimulation. But a work that captures so honestly how time shapes a person is hard to come by again. On the weight of that honesty alone, four stars are not too much.

Recommended for

• Those who enjoy the quiet flow of daily life over dramatic events
• Anyone drawn to the themes of time and growing up
• Those who want to experience a new experiment in the medium of film