"BOYHOOD" - THE MOVIE

This past Saturday, I watched Richard Linklater's wonderful movie Boyhood and enjoyed it very much.  The film is clocked at 2 hours and 44 minutes, but it didn't seem that long because I easily slipped into the groove of the pace, which is admittedly sometimes slow, but never boring.  Patricia Arquette, who plays the boy's mother, Olivia, in the movie, is excellent and Ethan Hawke, as the father, Mason, Sr, has done some of his best work with Linklater in this movie and in the Before trilogy.   I wonder how the writer/director could have known that the acting talent of the star of the film, six year old Ellar Coltrane, as Mason, would hold up so amazingly well throughout the 12 years that the filming took place.  Perhaps he didn't and took a chance anyway.   Linklater's daughter Lorelei plays the role of Mason's older sister, Samantha.

Linklater has done and is doing amazing and innovative films such as in the terrific Before trilogy, in which he takes up the stories of the characters at intervals of 10 years, with the principal actors aging in real time between filming.  And now Boyhood, with the actors aging, but not in real time, rather in scenes filmed over a period of 12 years and integrated into a single very fine film.

As with the earlier trilogy, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight, Linklater invited the actors to collaborate in writing the script, which developed as the movie was being made.  As a writer/director, Linklater appears be quite sure of himself and his talent to film without a finished script and to allow such close collaboration by the actors, resisting what must be the urge of most auteur filmmakers to have complete control of their projects.

Note: Not about the movie, but about me.  During some of the scenes of Mason and Sam in their teen years, I was uneasy, because I had flashbacks to the years when we had three teenagers in the throes of adolescenthood, which made the film quite difficult to watch.  Those were not the easiest times in our lives.