Review of Boyhood (2014) by Jim H — 01 Jun 2015

After his parents divorce, a boy grows up in Texas.

I really wanted to love this film; going into it, I was prepared to call it the best film of the year and maybe even the best film of the decade. After all, Richard Linklater accomplished a technical feat - making a major motion picture over twelve years - that has never been achieved in American cinema. And this kind of film is right up Linklater's alley, small-scale, human interest drama.

However, the film never gets going. I kept wondering what the primary conflict was. Is it just growing up? Could that carry a three-hour film? Not really. And when Mason grows up to become an anti-establishment hipster, we see that Linklater returns to his familiar character types. In Linklater films, there are two characters: the sell-outs and the anti-establishment types, and when Mason starts spouting the normal Linklater speeches about the "over-determinedness" of modern life, I knew that the film was only an achievement of the technical variety, not a real expansion of his artistic palette. And while "anachronistic" is not the right word, there are numerous references to the flavor of the times in which the scenes were shot - Britney Spears songs and Harry Potter book signings - that work as the filmmakers winking at the audience and saying, "Look at what was hot during this time.".

The best performance in the film belongs to Patricia Arquette whose final moment is chillingly heart-breaking.

Overall, if you know the backstory, Boyhood is a heck of a film, but if we just ignored that the film was shot over twelve years, it wouldn't be that much to write home about.