Boyhood

This is the best film of 2014.

I don’t think it will win any awards (it will probably be nominated for a few Oscars – best director comes to mind, but will probably win none of them) and not all audiences will love it because “nothing happens” (even though this isn’t true – an entire life happens). It is the ultimate coming-of-age film and the genre should be retired because this is as good as it will ever get. It’s an ambitious project with innumerable technical headaches (a making-of documentary would be a masterpiece of film history in itself) and it manages to be the deepest and most unforgettable experience you’ll have at the theatre this year.

This is the best film of 2014.

Boyhood is directed by Richard Linklater, the slacker-poet auteur from Austin, Texas. He’s probably the best director working today who doesn’t get nearly enough appreciation for the fantastic cinema (the Before trilogy, Dazed and Confused, Waking Life) he produces.

Linklater shot Boyhood over a 12-year period using the same central cast to chart the physical and emotional growth of a boy named Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from age 6 to age 18. This isn’t just a marketing gimmick but the entire artistic purpose of the film. If it wasn’t filmed over 12 years, or if the project failed halfway through, it probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day. There would be no point. The whole project is about the changes we go through as human beings as we age, unlike other coming-of-age films where a singular event changes the character’s lives forever. Real life doesn’t work that way. Linklater recognized that, and set out to make a coming-of-age movie drawing from his own recollections of his past. It was a series of events and moments that made him who he came to be, and he decided that it should be the same way for the characters.

What’s incredible about this film is how seamless it is. You would think that a film shot for a few days each summer over twelve years would be tonally all over the place, but it’s uniquely constant. The only thing that really changes is the actors get older – and even that happens sometimes without us realizing it.

Some may see Boyhood as a film where “nothing” really happens. This is far from the truth. The problem is that audiences have been trained to expect sensational events from movies. We expect characters to die, for explosive fights, and terrifying villains. The conversation between the events is generally just filler to segue the plot from one set piece to the next. There’s a moment in Boyhood where these ingrained audience expectations become obvious. In one scene, Mason is in an abandoned home with three other friends. They’re all drinking beers and throwing a saw blade into a piece of drywall. One of the characters stands up with the saw blade sticking out behind him and the entire audience in the theatre went silent. At that moment, we were all thinking the exact same thing: he’s going to fall on the saw blade! Despite all evidence to the contrary (this isn’t a cheap teen thriller), we’ve been programmed to expect these events from our entertainment.

There was an interview with Linklater talking about the Before films (which is a trilogy about the romance between two characters played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke) and why he is so interested in conversational films where “nothing” really happens. He explained that a lot happens in his own life, even though his own life isn’t filled with car chases, gunfights, toppling government conspiracies, or other typical movie plots. His own life is filled with the mundane things that all our lives are composed of – working, dating, getting groceries, parenting, etc. – that we too often don’t appreciate the significance of. Linklater explained (to the best of my recollection) that Before Sunrise is a film about two strangers talking to one another and crossing the distance between themselves to find a real human connection. That’s an incredible adventure – filled with self-doubt, fear, pain, excitement – and it all happens in a conversation between two people. It may not be what we expect from our entertainment, but it’s a lot closer to reality.

Boyhood is the same way: it’s an adventure crossing the distance between being a child to becoming an adult and the journey isn’t punctuated by murders, car chases, or running with arms outstretched in the rain. It’s a lot subtler than that and often, this is an adventure we only realize we’ve taken after it has already happened.

Grade: A

Sidenote: Boyhood has an incredible soundtrack and the songs are used to identify the time period the characters are living in, based on our own recollections of the songs from our lives.