Boyhood

boyhoodethan

Boyhood took 12 years to make because Richard Linklater wanted to show a child growing up with his single mom all the way to going away to college, and he wanted to use the same actor. He convinced Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke and the mom of the kid that plays Mason to go along with his idea* to shoot the movie for a few weeks each year to tell this story. It is really unique and nice to watch everyone change as they get older and it becomes a true coming-of-age movie in the process.

*The girl who plays Mason’s sister, Samantha, didn’t have much of a choice, since she’s Linklater’s daughter.

boyhood

The movie starts with Patricia Arquette struggling as a divorced mom about to move closer to her own mother to help raise her two kids since the dad (Ethan Hawke) has been out of the picture for quite some time. He stops by over the years, but takes a long time to grow up himself, so he isn’t much of a father figure to either of his kids.

As the years go by, people’s hair changes, weights fluctuate, characters get married and divorced and remarried. It was nice to not have anything on the screen telling us that it was a new year. As soon as you saw Mason was slightly older, you knew time had passed. The movie also wasn’t super obvious with major life changes that weren’t specific to Mason. If his mom remarried, it was just something that was in his life now, including a new brother and sister.

There weren’t a lot of big moments in the movie. In some scenes, I was expecting something major to happen since I’ve been trained that if kids are doing something they shouldn’t in an abandoned house, someone is going to get hurt, but this isn’t the movie for that. This movie was similar to Dazed and Confused in that way where there were a bunch of small moments and then the movie was over after his first day at college.

There were times that I wish the we could have spent more time with Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette, but I had to remind myself that the point of the movie was how they related to Mason so they were only involved from his point of view. It could have been that the actor playing Mason was okay, but not outstanding in terms of acting. There was something to be desired in his acting and made parts of the movie pretty lackluster. It was a risk when casting an actor at such a young age for a project like this. I feel like if it had been a better actor, then the movie would have been stronger. Overall, it was an interesting movie to watch, even though it was quite a long one.

Grade: B

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