Review: Linklater breaks new ground with Boyhood

Boyhood

Four and a half stars

Starring: Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, Lorelei Linklater

Directed by: Richard Linklater

Running time: 166 minutes

MONTREAL — What do you remember about growing up? If you’re like me, you can access an array of moments with varying degrees of interconnectedness, adding up to a sprawling narrative that constitutes the formative years of your life.

It’s too much to put into a single movie. Or maybe it’s not enough, lacking the cohesion of a conventional Hollywood storyline. Unless your name is Richard Linklater, in which case you grab a camera, a small, devoted cast and you shoot for a few days a year over a 12-year period to emerge with a paradigm-shifting film called Boyhood.

Linklater has never been one to worry about Hollywood conventions. One of the American director’s favourite topics is life itself — our perception of the world and our place within it.

Narrative? Not so much. The feeling of being alive, however mundane the situation? Now we’re getting somewhere.

Slacker (1991) and Dazed and Confused (1993) each followed the activities of an eclectic cast of characters over a 24-hour period — in the former, the freaks and underachievers hanging around Linklater’s native Austin, Tex.; in the latter, a group of teens on the last day of school.

With Before Sunrise (1995), Linklater launched what has so far become a decade-hopping trilogy (including 2004’s Before Sunset and last year’s Before Midnight), beginning with this long walk through the streets of Vienna taken by Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy), who meet as strangers on a train.

His animated, existential thinkpiece Waking Life (2001) floated between dream and reality, as the main character meandered through a series of disjointed philosophical conversations; while A Scanner Darkly (2006) used a similar rotoscope technique (tracing over images of real actors) to adapt Philip K. Dick’s dystopian fantasy about drugs, surveillance and relationships, starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder.

In between, there were mainstream concessions including School of Rock (2003), Bad News Bears (2005) and the delightfully skewed Bernie (2011). But throughout the last decade and change, unbeknownst to us, there was Boyhood, a secret project that riffed on Linklater’s enduring fascination with time, and downtime, in a totally new way.

There’s something magical in watching the transformations that take place over the course of the film’s nearly three-hour running time — first and foremost, in the faces and bodies of its characters, including: Ellar Coltrane as Mason Jr., whom Linklater follows from age 6; the director’s daughter Lorelei as Mason’s big sister, Samantha; Patricia Arquette as his intermittently single mom, Olivia; and Hawke as absentee father Mason Sr.

Boyhood is less a forward-thrust drama than a collection of situations which, over the years, reveal their place in the grand scheme of things. Far from a handicap, the film’s disjointed narrative elements become its greatest strength, showing that life’s — and especially, childhood’s — grand plot points never fall where we expect, and are often the result of elements beyond our control.

When we meet Mason Jr., he is lying in the grass, staring up at the cloudy sky, until his mom beckons. Later, he and his friends ogle a lingerie circular, he finds a dead bird, spray-paints some graffiti, and his sister annoys him by singing Britney Spears’s Oops!… I Did It Again while he protests from the top bunk.

Share and Enjoy