Boyhood

With not one, but two new Richard Linklater movies at VIFF this year (Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon), we thought it would be fun to revisit a couple of choice cuts from his rich back catalogue: School of Rock and the epic Boyhood. A dozen years in the making, Richard Linklater’s masterpiece chronicles the evolution of a boy into a young man, from six to 18. It is the ultimate coming-of-age movie, and one of the most audacious cinematic feats of the millennium.

It’s almost surprising that no one seems to have made a movie like Boyhood before. Its closest counterpart is probably the “7 Up” series, Michael Apted’s multipart documentary project that since 1964 has dropped in every seven years on the same, more or less, British women and men, beginning when they were 7. Watching seemingly carefree children thrive and fail as they age — or, more prosaically, turn into dreary, respectable citizens — can be like a knife in your heart. It can also be somewhat eerie, simply because the series compresses decades of a human life into scenes that are, by turns, seamless and jagged — an eeriness that Boyhood shares as 12 years of Mason’s life slips by in 165 startlingly fast minutes. We’re here today, gone tomorrow.

Radical in its conceit, familiar in its everyday details, “Boyhood” exists at the juncture of classical cinema and the modern art film without being slavishly indebted to either tradition. It’s a model of cinematic realism, and its pleasures are obvious yet mysterious. Even after seeing the film three times, I haven’t fully figured out why it has maintained such a hold on me, and why I’m eager to see it again. There are many reasons to love movies, from the stories they tell, to the beautiful characters who live and die for us. And yet the story in “Boyhood” is blissfully simple: A child grows up. This, along with the modesty of its physical production — its humble rooms, quiet moments, ordinary lives — can obscure Mr. Linklater’s ambitions and the greatness of his achievement… in Linklater’s masterpiece, he both captures moments in time and relinquishes them as he moves from year to year. He isn’t fighting time but embracing it in all its glorious and agonizingly fleeting beauty.

Manohla Dargis, New York Times