Boyhood

Okay, so right off the bat, I have to give the director and creators of this movie credit. This is a lofty project and it could have gone totally wrong in so many place so it's pretty impressive the result that they got given that this was a 12 year project.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's really talk about the movie Boyhood.

Boyhood centers around a young boy named Mason (played by Ellar Coltrane). Mason has a mother (played by Patricia Arquette) and a father (played by Ethan Hawke). And the entire movie is him wandering through 12 years of his life, the majority of them being in the 2000s. His parents are divorced so he is split between the two of them and he experiences all these different but normal childhood events over the course of a three hour long movie...

And that's pretty much it.

There's not much of a plot to this film and there's not much of a connective theme, I don't even think there was a connective script that ran through this movie because it's just a literal coming of age story and I basically spent the last 3 hours of my life watching this kid grow up and do his thing.

It's a really interesting idea and definitely something worth making note of when it comes to film making, but damn this movie could have been an hour shorter and you probably would have had the same result!

There are some good parts about the movie.

Put aside that this is one big gimmick that actually really paid off, part of it is just watching this family grow and go through life in the most unfiltered and "organic" way possible. You don't just see this kid grow up over 12 years, you see Ethan Hawke grow up, you see Patricia Arquette, you see the sister (played by Lorelei Linklater) grow up as well. And while it may not have any connective tissue to make any lick of sense, it's still a fascinating concept to run with and regardless of anything that I think of the film, the one thing I can say for sure is that this gimmick paid off big.

But the real parts of the film that work out the most are Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette. For a while, I thought this was going to be a less higher stakes version of To Kill A Mockingbird, where you see the kids grow up and their issues are out in front but the real story is about Hawke and Arquette and how they're growing just alongside Mason in this film.

That's not really the point, but Arquette and Hawke give really solid performances throughout the film and remember, that's not just over the span of the production of the film, that's over the span of 12 years!

There are some really hard felt moments where Patricia Arquette's character is going through some very serious stuff and I was hoping and praying that they would stop following this wide eyed starring kid and just focus on her story because that was the more interesting one throughout.

There's a part in the movie where she's married to one of her former college professors. Now a lot of that section of the movie is again, just Mason and others around him doing their normal run of the mill stuff. But then there's actually some conflict when you figure out that her second husband is an alcoholic and is abusive towards her and the kids. That's a really interesting part of the film and I wanted to see where that went, but it's really only mentioned a few more times after it happens.

I wanted to get some closure on that story, I wanted to figure out what happened to the second husband's kids. I wanted to know the lasting effect having some glass thrown at you and watching your mother get beat would have on a kid. Instead, he just keeps on starring into nothingness and it's not really addressed later in the film except for one conversation he has with Ethan Hawke.

And that's the thing that probably bothered me the most about the main character, Mason.

Mason doesn't really react at all to the events that happen around him.

I get it, he's just a kid and they would have probably had better chances at winning the lottery than finding a kid who can act brilliantly at age 7 as well as keep it up for 12 years. I mean, let's be honest, Ellar Coltrane is not the greatest actor in the world. The same kind of goes for Lorelai Linklater. They're not the worst, but I got bored watching them instead of Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette. I couldn't really tell if he was sad about something, amused, disappointed, it was all just starring into the abyss and questioning what's the meaning of life in the most pretentious ways possible.

I suppose there is a certain amount of leeway given as these kids are filmed at some of the most awkward times in a child's life, and if you look at the side by side pictures of them progressing over the years, they have awkward phases.

I say that because I myself had awkward phases and probably am still going through one as I grow up.

But the problem is they barely address that. If you watch the interview below, you notice that Coltrane mentions that the director let him grow his hair out however he wanted and kept acne visible to show a realistic transition of time during Coltrane's boyhood. But beyond the subtle hints like that, there's really not any mention of the real things kids go through in life.

If this is supposed to be the world's ultimate coming of age tale, where's the point where Mason has his first kiss, or has sex for the first time. There's a point where he starts drinking and smoking and I guess that the subtle passiveness of not really addressing huge life events like that is how it actually goes, but then what the hell is this movie about?

I think they could have either focused on the little things about Mason's life and made bigger deals about them, or gone the opposite and made an actual cohesive story that ran throughout with drama and tension like they sort of did with the alcoholic abusive second husband Patricia Arquette has. But instead Boyhood kind of gives us this loosy goosey free roam outline of a story that just sort of ends when Mason is no longer in his "boyhood".

Yes the issues of children are not going to be the biggest issues in the world, but that's exactly what a coming of age story has. This comes more off as a really artsy film class project that had a bigger budget and goes on for 2 and a half hours too long.

If they just wanted to go through this kids life, they could have had a montage of very small moments put in the span of a short film run time and it probably would have given the same result.

Instead we get Boyhood, an overly long and directionless art project that it kind of seems like the director just got tired with and said, you know what, let's end this all when he gets to college and call it boyhood!

There are definite good elements of this movie and Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette do give really good performances. But this is not the kind of movie that is going to last with you. I think it was bold but it's really only famous for the production that took over 12 years to create. If this movie had been made in the same time any other coming of age tale takes, it would have been critically tanked. But because it's the same kid over 12 years, it's suddenly given praise. I just don't agree with that.

Overall, Boyhood is not really a movie that I would recommend. If the acting from the main kid was better I might be a little more impressed, but that is a tall order because that is basically lightning in a bottle. If you want to see Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette give good performances over 12 years, this is a movie to check out, otherwise, I'd skip it.

But those are my thoughts on Boyhood. What did you think? Do you think I'm missing the point of this magnum opus of a film? Comment and Discuss below! You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as send me your requests for films I should review in the future. If you follow me on Twitter you can get updates on future movie news and reviews coming out of this blog.

I'll leave you with this. I'm going to leave the link to the honest trailer because it is pretty good, but this interview with the main kid is actually pretty telling to the insight that was put into this movie. I don't know, what do you think? Enjoy!