Boyhood: An idea whose time has come

Boyhood

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

Rated: 8.5/10

A Hollywood movie that’s 2 hours 44 minutes long? You must be joking! That long a Hollywood movie actually holding on to its own? You must be beyond joking! And holding on to its own without any big star ensemble? Well, that’s the least of the stun quotient of this film, considering director Richard Linklater this time round, cooks up and executes novelties as no man has ever done before.

Call it a gimmick, a mad man’s ultimate fantasy, a big experiment or an unprecedented idea, the verdict remains the same: It’s a head-turner, sheer brilliance and comes with a lot of awe and wow. Really! Who would have actually thought of investing 12 years of annual filming just to watch a boy — and the world around him — grow in real time from age six to age 18? Who would have the patience or the wherewithal or even the starcast which would be willing to give 12 years of their life to such a strange project? That all this falls into place off-tape and unfolds beautifully as cinema, gives the film and its director his best shot at the Oscars this year.

The best thing about the film is that you age alongside Coltrane who begins as a six-year-old cherubic boy staring into the clear blue sky at the backyard of his school and ends up as a gauche, slightly cynical, unkempt and lanky 18-year-old with some beer, girls, indecisions, angst, existential questions, simmering anger and a lot of daddy time in his closet. Boyhood stands out as unique and gripping because Richard Linklater captures life as it happens without drama or exaggeration, nothing more, nothing less just realism.

Over a decade and two years in the making, Linklater does nothing to spruce up the pace of the film. However, its extreme languidness somehow captures and engagingly showcases the idea behind such a project.

The story of this boy (Mason Jr) reflects American society at its rawest — embodying dysfunctional husbands, single motherhood, abusive stepfathers, high costs of living, the angst of children being displaced regularly due to a single working mother and adjustments that life teaches you — sometimes per force, sometimes inevitably. And yet life goes on, normally. People grow up, children go to college and the divorced parents find their space with other partners. It’s this extreme ordinariness of this movie that makes it so extra-ordinary.

The only known star Ethan Hawke is a side character even as the two growing children — Coltrane and Linklater (director’s real daughter) — see off braces, acne, Britney Spears, Wii and adolescence with grace and reconciliation. Coltrane is particularly engaging with his overt laziness which allows him to take the travails of his childhood, as his mother goes through a couple of husbands who disrupt his idyllic childhood without sense or reason. The only overt emotion he shows throughout this film is anger at his stepfather getting his hair cut forcefully when he was eight but that too vanishes in some time.

As a slightly bearded Coltrane sits on a rock with a new soon-to-be girlfriend looking into the horizon awaiting his new phase of life in college, the film closes — to buoyant applause and reluctant tears, unveiling the power of understatement and the bite of under-dressed realism. That’s the greatness of Linklater’s path-breaking effort.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 16 November, 2014