<aside class="trb_embed " data-content-id="80770592" data-content-size="leadart" data-content-type="image" data-content-subtype="photo" data-role="socialshare_item imgsize_ratiosizecontainer " data-state=" "> <figure data-role="imgsize_item" class="trb_embed_imageContainer_figure">
</figure> Ellar Coltrane, left, and Ethan Hawke in "Boyhood." (Matt Lankes / IFC Films)
</aside>
<time class="trb_article_dateline_time" datetime="2014-07-10T15:20:00PDT" data-datetime-timezone="PDT" data-datetime-month="July" data-datetime-monthshort="Jul." data-datetime-day="10" data-datetime-year="2014" data-datetime-weekday="Thursday" data-datetime-weekdayshort="Thu." data-datetime-fullclock="3:20:00 PM" data-datetime-clock="3:20 PM" data-datetime-hour="3 PM" data-datetime-daydiff="-28 days left"></time>
There is a telling scene deep inside "Boyhood" that gets at the essential core of the emotional appeal of Richard Linklater's startling new film. It takes place in a rural church with a pastor sermonizing about doubting Thomas and faith and those who believe without seeing.
That ability to believe without seeing most certainly guides this film. Writer-director Linklater couldn't have known where 12 years of shooting this story would lead, following a boy and his family — and the actors who play them — across time. But we are blessed that he did, 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.
<aside class="trb_embed " data-content-id="80770716" data-content-size="medium" data-content-type="image" data-content-subtype="photo" data-role="socialshare_item imgsize_ratiosizecontainer lightbox_container " data-state=" " data-embed-id="80770716"> <figure data-role="imgsize_item" class="trb_embed_imageContainer_figure">
</figure> Patricia Arquette and Ellar Coltrane in a scene from the film "Boyhood." (AP)
</aside>Though the list of players expands and contracts through the years, the central family unit consists of Ellar Coltrane as the boy, Mason Jr.; Lorelei Linklater, the director's daughter, as older sister Samantha; Patricia Arquette as single-mom Olivia; and Ethan Hawke as Mason Sr., the father who is finding his way back into his kids' lives as the film begins.
The process was an unusual one to say the least. Starting in 2002, each year Linklater would begin the conversation with the cast, starting with Coltrane, talking about life and change. Then the filmmaker would write, next he would gather his cast for a few days of shooting. Finally Linklater and his longtime editor Sandra Adair would edit the footage and store it away. Year after year, the movie moved forward, taking shape, growing up alongside Mason. It can sound like a gimmick, but it's anything but; Linklater's leap of faith has given us an experience as much as a film.
<aside class="trb_panelmod_container" data-role="panelmod_container imgsize_ratiosizecontainer" data-load-type="noop" data-panelmod-type="relatedContent">lRelated
<dl class="trb_panelmod_body_content"><dt class="trb_panelmod_body_section">Movies Now</dt><dd>He sees flashes of his 'Boyhood' screen at Sundance to rave reviews</dd></dl>See all related
8
</aside> There is wonder to be found in the very ordinariness of "Boyhood," from the clouds 6-year-old Mason watches in the opening scene to the rock ridge where as a new college freshman he is perched and pondering life in the film's final moments. It is a credit to Linklater's facility with long-form storytelling that even after nearly three hours, I didn't want the movie to end.
Though it has mythical qualities, "Boyhood" is framed by specific realities and perpetual ambiguity. Olivia's first major decision — to move the family to Houston — is rooted in the stack of bills in front of her, the dead-end job. Houston is the promised land where her mother can help with the kids, she can go back to school, make a better life. Dreams propel her forward into a future she can't foresee.
<aside class="trb_embed " data-content-id="79731862" data-content-size="small" data-content-type="story" data-content-subtype="story" data-role="socialshare_item imgsize_ratiosizecontainer" data-state=" " data-load-type="comment" data-load-method="innerHtml"> <figure data-role="imgsize_item" class="trb_embed_imageContainer_figure">
</figure> Related: Richard Linklater's 'Boyhood': Can it be a mainstream breakout? Steven Zeitchik
</aside>For the kids it's a constant uprooting. They feel the change differently though the framing is the same — leaving everything they know for everything they don't, it's harder for them to see the promise. That motif of movement is one of "Boyhood's" constants. Stepparents, blended families, girlfriends, teachers, divorces, interests, ideas, disruptions flow through the years and provide the narrative structure.
The time transitions are remarkably seamless — Mason walks down a hallway at one age, turns a corner and is a few years older. It works, especially since all the details shift as fluidly, the difference embedded in the clothes, hair, video games, music and of course the faces.
Mason and Samantha, Coltrane and young Linklater literally grow up in front of us. But in their own way, the changes in Olivia and Mason Sr., Arquette and Hawke, are just as marked.
Though the themes are serious, the film is filled with a lightness. Mason, sprawled on his bed, rolling his eyes as a 9-year-old Samantha makes him a captive audience to her singing and dancing, says everything about the way siblings rely on, relate to and test each other.
<aside class="trb_panelmod_container" data-role="panelmod_container" data-panelmod-type="comments">
</aside>A few scenes later, after Dad has blown back into town, his reconnecting with the kids spills into a bowling alley. After a few gutter balls, Mason wants bumpers so he can get a strike like his sister. Dad resists, a laid-back admonition to his son essentially to forget the bumpers, toughen up, take the knocks. Inside that moment is a father pushing his son toward adulthood, but it is also a man taking that first step into actual parenting. Mason Sr. will get better in time, growth comes to everyone in the film.
Because Linklater has wrapped the family around time, and time around that family, "Boyhood" allows you to see the dynamics from all sides. The way childhood innocence shifts into an increasingly informed state. That fusion of unconditional love and insistent worries about inadequacy that is parenthood.
<aside class="trb_embed " data-content-id="80014999" data-content-size="medium" data-content-type="video" data-content-subtype="embeddedvideo-youtube" data-role="socialshare_item imgsize_ratiosizecontainer lightbox_container mediamanager_container" data-state=" " data-embed-id="80014999" data-load-type="comment" data-load-method="innerHtml"> <figure data-role="imgsize_item" class="trb_video_embeddedvideo_figure">
</figure>
Watch: Official trailer for Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"
</aside>There is a great balance between humor and pathos in each of the performances. Arquette and Hawke are masterful in following the arc of adults maturing in the wake of their mistakes. The actors, who've done so much fine work in their careers, bring a humanity, resilience and vulnerability to the roles that we've not seen quite as fully realized before. And Lorelei Linklater makes Samantha's transition from delightful youngster to petulant teen absolutely believable.
But Coltrane is the film's emotional glue. He is remarkable on-screen at every stage. Early on, he's a young boy of few words but even at 6 enough of a performer that he absorbs everything in ways that allow you to sense and see. As Mason grows, the dialogue and the emotions become more complex, and Coltrane's performance follows in kind.
The moody teen who turns to photography to express his artistic inclinations caught in an insolent glance at a disapproving teacher. The growing sense of care and understanding he quietly extends to his mother. The esoteric notions about existence emerging along with serious feelings for the girl he is sharing them with. All this Coltrane makes real. And out of the Coltrane-Mason connection, an actor emerges.
For all of its uniqueness, "Boyhood" is exactly the kind of film we should have expected Linklater to do. Over the span of his career, the filmmaker has proved to be as much a cultural anthropologist as writer-director, ever curious about how things will work out. His collaboration with Julie Delpy and Hawke in the brilliant "Before" trilogy — "Sunrise," "Sunset" and "Midnight," marking out a couple's various emotional states — extended over nearly two decades, the director and his stars creating an intimate expression of love and relationships.
There is also a veracity that infuses all of the director's work. If God is in the details, then Linklater is contemporary cinema's god. From the people that populate his films to the places they unfold, he threads that needle perfectly. In "Boyhood," it lives in everyone Mason encounters: the professor/stepfather (Marco Perella) descending into alcoholism and abuse. The remarkably gentle torch-passing in Grandpa Cliff's (Richard Jones) graduation gift to Mason — a rifle and a lesson on how to shoot. Every scene can be deconstructed in that way, broken apart into many small truths.
Along with the cast and the creator is "Boyhood's" equally adept crew. Cinematographers Lee Daniel and Shane Kelly work as seamlessly as the film. Production designer Rodney Becker and costume designer Kari Perkins ensure Linklater gets the period changes right. Music supervisors Randall Poster and Meghan Currier are behind a soundtrack that sings of the passing of time from Coldplay to Arcade Fire.
<aside class="trb_embed " data-content-id="80770717" data-content-size="large" data-content-type="image" data-content-subtype="photo" data-role="socialshare_item imgsize_ratiosizecontainer lightbox_container" data-state=" " data-embed-id="80770717" data-load-type="comment" data-load-method="innerHtml"> <figure data-role="imgsize_item" class="trb_embed_imageContainer_figure">
</figure> Ellar Coltrane in a scene from the movie "Boyhood." (Sundance Film Festival)
</aside>I cannot remember when a film has moved me more or captured so well all the colors and shadings of the personal, yet universal process of becoming. It is tempting to pile on a thousand more superlatives. But I won't. Because the best way to experience the film is to do exactly that, experience it.
</aside>
<time class="trb_article_dateline_time" datetime="2014-07-10T15:20:00PDT" data-datetime-timezone="PDT" data-datetime-month="July" data-datetime-monthshort="Jul." data-datetime-day="10" data-datetime-year="2014" data-datetime-weekday="Thursday" data-datetime-weekdayshort="Thu." data-datetime-fullclock="3:20:00 PM" data-datetime-clock="3:20 PM" data-datetime-hour="3 PM" data-datetime-daydiff="-28 days left"></time>
There is a telling scene deep inside "Boyhood" that gets at the essential core of the emotional appeal of Richard Linklater's startling new film. It takes place in a rural church with a pastor sermonizing about doubting Thomas and faith and those who believe without seeing.
That ability to believe without seeing most certainly guides this film. Writer-director Linklater couldn't have known where 12 years of shooting this story would lead, following a boy and his family — and the actors who play them — across time. But we are blessed that he did, 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.
<aside class="trb_embed " data-content-id="80770716" data-content-size="medium" data-content-type="image" data-content-subtype="photo" data-role="socialshare_item imgsize_ratiosizecontainer lightbox_container " data-state=" " data-embed-id="80770716"> <figure data-role="imgsize_item" class="trb_embed_imageContainer_figure">
</aside>Though the list of players expands and contracts through the years, the central family unit consists of Ellar Coltrane as the boy, Mason Jr.; Lorelei Linklater, the director's daughter, as older sister Samantha; Patricia Arquette as single-mom Olivia; and Ethan Hawke as Mason Sr., the father who is finding his way back into his kids' lives as the film begins.
The process was an unusual one to say the least. Starting in 2002, each year Linklater would begin the conversation with the cast, starting with Coltrane, talking about life and change. Then the filmmaker would write, next he would gather his cast for a few days of shooting. Finally Linklater and his longtime editor Sandra Adair would edit the footage and store it away. Year after year, the movie moved forward, taking shape, growing up alongside Mason. It can sound like a gimmick, but it's anything but; Linklater's leap of faith has given us an experience as much as a film.
<aside class="trb_panelmod_container" data-role="panelmod_container imgsize_ratiosizecontainer" data-load-type="noop" data-panelmod-type="relatedContent">lRelated
8
</aside> There is wonder to be found in the very ordinariness of "Boyhood," from the clouds 6-year-old Mason watches in the opening scene to the rock ridge where as a new college freshman he is perched and pondering life in the film's final moments. It is a credit to Linklater's facility with long-form storytelling that even after nearly three hours, I didn't want the movie to end.
Though it has mythical qualities, "Boyhood" is framed by specific realities and perpetual ambiguity. Olivia's first major decision — to move the family to Houston — is rooted in the stack of bills in front of her, the dead-end job. Houston is the promised land where her mother can help with the kids, she can go back to school, make a better life. Dreams propel her forward into a future she can't foresee.
<aside class="trb_embed " data-content-id="79731862" data-content-size="small" data-content-type="story" data-content-subtype="story" data-role="socialshare_item imgsize_ratiosizecontainer" data-state=" " data-load-type="comment" data-load-method="innerHtml"> <figure data-role="imgsize_item" class="trb_embed_imageContainer_figure">
</aside>For the kids it's a constant uprooting. They feel the change differently though the framing is the same — leaving everything they know for everything they don't, it's harder for them to see the promise. That motif of movement is one of "Boyhood's" constants. Stepparents, blended families, girlfriends, teachers, divorces, interests, ideas, disruptions flow through the years and provide the narrative structure.
The time transitions are remarkably seamless — Mason walks down a hallway at one age, turns a corner and is a few years older. It works, especially since all the details shift as fluidly, the difference embedded in the clothes, hair, video games, music and of course the faces.
Mason and Samantha, Coltrane and young Linklater literally grow up in front of us. But in their own way, the changes in Olivia and Mason Sr., Arquette and Hawke, are just as marked.
Though the themes are serious, the film is filled with a lightness. Mason, sprawled on his bed, rolling his eyes as a 9-year-old Samantha makes him a captive audience to her singing and dancing, says everything about the way siblings rely on, relate to and test each other.
<aside class="trb_panelmod_container" data-role="panelmod_container" data-panelmod-type="comments">
</aside>A few scenes later, after Dad has blown back into town, his reconnecting with the kids spills into a bowling alley. After a few gutter balls, Mason wants bumpers so he can get a strike like his sister. Dad resists, a laid-back admonition to his son essentially to forget the bumpers, toughen up, take the knocks. Inside that moment is a father pushing his son toward adulthood, but it is also a man taking that first step into actual parenting. Mason Sr. will get better in time, growth comes to everyone in the film.
Because Linklater has wrapped the family around time, and time around that family, "Boyhood" allows you to see the dynamics from all sides. The way childhood innocence shifts into an increasingly informed state. That fusion of unconditional love and insistent worries about inadequacy that is parenthood.
<aside class="trb_embed " data-content-id="80014999" data-content-size="medium" data-content-type="video" data-content-subtype="embeddedvideo-youtube" data-role="socialshare_item imgsize_ratiosizecontainer lightbox_container mediamanager_container" data-state=" " data-embed-id="80014999" data-load-type="comment" data-load-method="innerHtml"> <figure data-role="imgsize_item" class="trb_video_embeddedvideo_figure">
Watch: Official trailer for Richard Linklater's "Boyhood"
</aside>There is a great balance between humor and pathos in each of the performances. Arquette and Hawke are masterful in following the arc of adults maturing in the wake of their mistakes. The actors, who've done so much fine work in their careers, bring a humanity, resilience and vulnerability to the roles that we've not seen quite as fully realized before. And Lorelei Linklater makes Samantha's transition from delightful youngster to petulant teen absolutely believable.
But Coltrane is the film's emotional glue. He is remarkable on-screen at every stage. Early on, he's a young boy of few words but even at 6 enough of a performer that he absorbs everything in ways that allow you to sense and see. As Mason grows, the dialogue and the emotions become more complex, and Coltrane's performance follows in kind.
The moody teen who turns to photography to express his artistic inclinations caught in an insolent glance at a disapproving teacher. The growing sense of care and understanding he quietly extends to his mother. The esoteric notions about existence emerging along with serious feelings for the girl he is sharing them with. All this Coltrane makes real. And out of the Coltrane-Mason connection, an actor emerges.
For all of its uniqueness, "Boyhood" is exactly the kind of film we should have expected Linklater to do. Over the span of his career, the filmmaker has proved to be as much a cultural anthropologist as writer-director, ever curious about how things will work out. His collaboration with Julie Delpy and Hawke in the brilliant "Before" trilogy — "Sunrise," "Sunset" and "Midnight," marking out a couple's various emotional states — extended over nearly two decades, the director and his stars creating an intimate expression of love and relationships.
There is also a veracity that infuses all of the director's work. If God is in the details, then Linklater is contemporary cinema's god. From the people that populate his films to the places they unfold, he threads that needle perfectly. In "Boyhood," it lives in everyone Mason encounters: the professor/stepfather (Marco Perella) descending into alcoholism and abuse. The remarkably gentle torch-passing in Grandpa Cliff's (Richard Jones) graduation gift to Mason — a rifle and a lesson on how to shoot. Every scene can be deconstructed in that way, broken apart into many small truths.
Along with the cast and the creator is "Boyhood's" equally adept crew. Cinematographers Lee Daniel and Shane Kelly work as seamlessly as the film. Production designer Rodney Becker and costume designer Kari Perkins ensure Linklater gets the period changes right. Music supervisors Randall Poster and Meghan Currier are behind a soundtrack that sings of the passing of time from Coldplay to Arcade Fire.
<aside class="trb_embed " data-content-id="80770717" data-content-size="large" data-content-type="image" data-content-subtype="photo" data-role="socialshare_item imgsize_ratiosizecontainer lightbox_container" data-state=" " data-embed-id="80770717" data-load-type="comment" data-load-method="innerHtml"> <figure data-role="imgsize_item" class="trb_embed_imageContainer_figure">
</aside>I cannot remember when a film has moved me more or captured so well all the colors and shadings of the personal, yet universal process of becoming. It is tempting to pile on a thousand more superlatives. But I won't. Because the best way to experience the film is to do exactly that, experience it.
[h=1]Boyhood’ movie review: Richard Linklater’s audacious, epic cinematic journey[/h] [h=2]
[/h]
It took 12 years to film Richard Linklater's "Boyhood," a coming of age story filmed in real-time. The Washington Post's Ann Hornaday reviews the film, saying the result is "monumental." (Jayne W. Orenstein/The Washington Post)
By Ann Hornaday July 17
<article> In the movie “Boyhood,” we watch as a kid named Mason (Ellar Coltrane) grows up from a little boy into a nearly grown young man, living with his mom and sister in a series of Texas towns, solidifying his relationship with an unsteady father, struggling through schools and step-parents and girlfriends and himself until, in the film’s final scenes, he starts college.
Audiences might think they’ve seen this kind of coming-of-age story before. But they’ve never seen a film like “Boyhood,” which in the hands of writer-director Richard Linklater turns from classic cinematic portraiture into something epic, transcendent and monumental. Filmed for a few days every year over 12 years, “Boyhood” breaks open a brand new genre: a fictional drama contoured and shaped by reality; a lightly scripted ensemble piece executed by both professional and non-professional actors; an experiment in time, narrative and cinematic practice that utterly transforms the boundaries of what film can look like and feel like and achieve.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about “Boyhood” is that it draws no attention to its own lofty ambitions. Working in his signature style of observational understatement, Linklater simply allows viewers to eavesdrop and watch, unnoticed, as Mason and his family go about their daily business. But within that simple premise, Linklater discovers multiple emotions and meanings, the film equivalent of a world in a drop of water.
When “Boyhood” opens, 6-year-old Mason — dreamy, easily distracted, watchfully quiet — is being harangued by his mom, Olivia (played by Patricia Arquette), about his behavior in school, while his bossy older sister, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the filmmaker’s daughter), annoys him by singing Britney Spears over and over. When Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) shows up from working in Alaska, he comes bearing gifts and the loosey-goosey aura of the circus coming to town. But as “Boyhood” progresses, Dad begins to embrace fatherhood more seriously. One of the film’s most touching and funny scenes occurs in a bowling alley, where the hapless father tries to engage Mason in a just-buds chat about the facts of life (“We can do this!”).
Indeed, much of “Boyhood” has to do with how Mason becomes a man — under the tutelage of his own childish but earnest father, by watching the problematic men his mom becomes involved with, and even within the context of the sexist, epithet-laden rhetoric of his peers. By the time Mason, now a deep-voiced teenager, affects an earring, blue nail polish and an artistic interest in photography, viewers get the feeling that he’s dodged at least most of the misogynist conditioning of a boy’s life.
</article>
[/h]
It took 12 years to film Richard Linklater's "Boyhood," a coming of age story filmed in real-time. The Washington Post's Ann Hornaday reviews the film, saying the result is "monumental." (Jayne W. Orenstein/The Washington Post)
By Ann Hornaday July 17
<article> In the movie “Boyhood,” we watch as a kid named Mason (Ellar Coltrane) grows up from a little boy into a nearly grown young man, living with his mom and sister in a series of Texas towns, solidifying his relationship with an unsteady father, struggling through schools and step-parents and girlfriends and himself until, in the film’s final scenes, he starts college.
Audiences might think they’ve seen this kind of coming-of-age story before. But they’ve never seen a film like “Boyhood,” which in the hands of writer-director Richard Linklater turns from classic cinematic portraiture into something epic, transcendent and monumental. Filmed for a few days every year over 12 years, “Boyhood” breaks open a brand new genre: a fictional drama contoured and shaped by reality; a lightly scripted ensemble piece executed by both professional and non-professional actors; an experiment in time, narrative and cinematic practice that utterly transforms the boundaries of what film can look like and feel like and achieve.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about “Boyhood” is that it draws no attention to its own lofty ambitions. Working in his signature style of observational understatement, Linklater simply allows viewers to eavesdrop and watch, unnoticed, as Mason and his family go about their daily business. But within that simple premise, Linklater discovers multiple emotions and meanings, the film equivalent of a world in a drop of water.
When “Boyhood” opens, 6-year-old Mason — dreamy, easily distracted, watchfully quiet — is being harangued by his mom, Olivia (played by Patricia Arquette), about his behavior in school, while his bossy older sister, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the filmmaker’s daughter), annoys him by singing Britney Spears over and over. When Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) shows up from working in Alaska, he comes bearing gifts and the loosey-goosey aura of the circus coming to town. But as “Boyhood” progresses, Dad begins to embrace fatherhood more seriously. One of the film’s most touching and funny scenes occurs in a bowling alley, where the hapless father tries to engage Mason in a just-buds chat about the facts of life (“We can do this!”).
Indeed, much of “Boyhood” has to do with how Mason becomes a man — under the tutelage of his own childish but earnest father, by watching the problematic men his mom becomes involved with, and even within the context of the sexist, epithet-laden rhetoric of his peers. By the time Mason, now a deep-voiced teenager, affects an earring, blue nail polish and an artistic interest in photography, viewers get the feeling that he’s dodged at least most of the misogynist conditioning of a boy’s life.
</article>
