4) Boyhood
Boyhood is a blur. That’s intentional. The film is awe-inspiringly massive in scope, and the unceasing motor that drives it forward is forceful enough to flatten. Shot over 12 years, with director Richard Linklater filming scenes with the same young actor (Ellar Coltrane, sublime) for a few weeks annually, capturing a boy named Mason as he transforms from bright-eyed six-year-old into wearier but still hopeful 18-year-old, Boyhood is a singular masterpiece. Technically, it’s an astonishing feat, and narratively, it’s a daring experiment on which only one filmmaker would ever have taken a chance. It’s also a sprawling mess, a film in which scenes smash and splinter into other scenes, like magnificent waves crashing down one after another. Months or years pass in the blink of an eye.
Again, that’s intentional. The inner motor I spoke of earlier is time, constant, inexorable, unavoidable, and the cruel but honest way in which Linklater addresses it has a haunting beauty. We see how time allows for the nourishing of life, as Mason’s deeply flawed but strong-willed mother (Patricia Arquette) fights successfully to raise two children (with the occasional help and hindrance of their free-wheeling father, played by Ethan Hawke), and as those children flourish from little kids into thoughtful, loving adults. But we see equally time’s capacity for destruction, as marriages implode, relationships dissolve and people cast aside things that were once intrinsically linked to them, searching for some more permanent sense of self.
Boyhood rambles and meanders, some moments lingering and others flickering by with impossible speed, but for all of the repeated misery and merriment in Mason’s adolescence, the film is mostly about how we’re all marched steadily into the future against our will, borne down a river of temporality like so much helpless driftwood.
How did it all go by so fast? That’s the question at the heart of Boyhood. Linklater asks it – he yearns for bygone times as much as the rest of us. But with this film, he also gives us the answer – that it went by because we lived it, and we were there in that moment, but it passed into memory, and now here we are with another moment, one just as resplendent and ripe with potential. If there’s a lesson to be learned from what he has created, it’s that time is fleeting. We’d be well-advised to cherish every last second, to seize the moment and to let the moment seize us, and in doing so live out our days with the knowledge that our ephemerality, that we will eventually live out our days, is exactly what makes it all so valuable.
