01 Boyhood
Made for a piffling $4m with an untrained lead and a level of dedication and foresight unrivalled in modern cinema, Richard Linklater captured 12 years in the life of a boy as he progresses from precocious child to testy teenager to self-assured young man. Who needs CGI when you can make use of time, the greatest special effect of all?
Shooting a few scenes each year, Linklater sewed together a film of moments that add up to something quietly monumental: an intimate three-hour epic in which we watch Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) mature before our eyes. The director perhaps drew inspiration from the documentary series Up, in which Michael Apted checks in on the same group of people every seven years, and the indie figurehead of course has his own form in this area: the Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight triptych showcases three ages in the romantic life of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s lovebirds. Boyhood, however, feels fresh and fertile, not least for placing its faith in a screen newbie who might easily have turned into the most uncharismatic lemon to ever sully celluloid.
Yet it’s not just Coltrane who evolves on screen. We also watch Patricia Arquette and Hawke grow as Mason’s imperfect parents, while Lorelei Linklater (the director’s own daughter) impresses throughout as his showboating sister. With these as his constants, the filmmaker lets the rest become a blur of bullying stepfathers, demanding teachers and familial minutiae, a restless human tableau in which we can all see fragments and reminders of our own life experience. Like all great art, Boyhood reveals the universal in the specific, the immense in the minuscule. But it also shows us something revelatory: the boundless potential of cinema as an art form when commercial considerations cease to apply.