Review of Boyhood (2014) by Josefine L — 13 Sep 2015

There is a beautiful simplicity to this movie. Filming over twelve years is an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking for any director, but Richard Linklater is up for the task. This coming of age movie follows one boy and his family, as he transitions from childhood to adulthood.

Rather than making a movie with different actors, Linklater uses the same cast of actors and filmed it over a twelve-year period. There is no artificial movie magic to age the characters, and the effect is profoundly powerful.

The characters not only literally grow older, but their characters evolve slowly and organically throughout the two hour and forty-five minutes of the film. The acting is superb; it makes you stop and remember how different we are as individuals at various points in our lives.

Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are great as the parents and Ellar Coltrane and Lorelei Linklater were phenomenal young actors as their children. All four of them handle their character transformations impeccably well.

This is particularly impressive considering how different their character is at each stage of the movie. They are essentially playing multiple roles, even if they all portray the same individual. By making the movie over a twelve-year time span, the actors are paralleling their roles.

It allows them to pull in their real-life energy, attitudes, and emotions into their roles; that is why it feels so genuine and realistic. The thoughtful story and a well-crafted sincere dialogue feel like watching a real family.

It is not a particularly eventful story, which makes the movie more of an experience than a theatrical entertainment. The story meanders along slowly changing, similar to our own lives. Not everything is important or happens for a reason, but it shows how even snapshots of dull moments in our lives hold great amounts of meaning and can represent who we are at that point in time.

It is an incredibly insightful movie, because it makes you reflect your personal journey through life, regardless of your age or generation. There is a universal quality of truthfulness to it in how it confronts the viewers with their own childhood, adolescence, romantic love, heartbreaks, youth, parenthood, and late-life mortality.

It is hard to believe a movie can do all this, but it does it all and there is nothing else like it.