Boyhood (2014)

Every filmmakers who makes "personal films" (i.e. any not governed by studio heads or McDonalds sponsorships) lets you see the world through their own view. Filmmakers build ideologies into their work as much as authors do. Take Spielberg, who has worked in every genre you can think of yet wraps it all under the idea that great evil does exist in the world, but there's always enough good to overpower it. Sometimes you'll watch a film and know whoever made it has the sort of brain you wish you could jump inside and take a roam around in. This is true of all art, really: I'll read something or watch a movie or even watch an interview and decide I love a person's mind. (There's really not enough love for people's minds). Richard Linklater, going off of my (so far incomplete) viewing of his movies, has a mind I'm totally in tune with.

Linklater isn't so much interested in twisting the world to fit into his movies as capturing that world and hoping it'll make a good movie. In Slacker (1991) we follow one Los Angelino to the next, observe their weird conversations and day-to-day mundanities, and then they leave (never to return) and we move onto the next character. Linklater's movies are best viewed as examinations of a subject (LA slackers, youths on the last day of school, two lovers) than as an exact story that can be spun out of them. It's why Boyhood, Linklater's newest film, breaks one of the 101 rules of screenwriting, not having any "inciting incident" or problem to give the film a driving force, and yet still has the power to create a sense of importance in every scene. The driving force of this movie is simply the driving force behind watching other people, or observing a child grow - watching the changes, or the things that never seem to change, for god knows what reason beyond trying to explain some infinite, unexplainable thing.

You can't blame the marketing team for focusing on the gimmick of Boyhood - a film that follows a boy from the ages of 5 to 18, shot with the same actors over 13 years, the actors visibly aging the same as the characters. Such gimmicks remind you of the power of film, but most filmmakers who try to carry them out are more interested in pulling off such a lengthy, original feat than doing anything with it. So it's good Linklater's the one behind the camera - he's just as interested in entertaining as in showing off, more so actually. The movie's length and the amount of time it shows means it doesn't feel weird watching the mundanities of real life drama: things repeat even when they shouldn't, not all characters get what they deserve (in a good and bad sense) and despite the changes that happen to the boy, Mason, whose "boyhood" we're following, there's no "arc" he goes through as a character - like in real life, people change in small ways, they don't go through grand personality makeovers.

I'm sure some will complain about how the film's title only references Mason when the film also shows the coming-of-age of his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) and his parents (Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke). I could sing all of their praises although all the current award buzz highlights the acting talent on display anyway. Linklater's script gives them all stuff to do, but it's really how the father character is presented that is the most impressive. Hawke's character at first appears an absentee parent, his kids haven't seen him in a long time under the guise he's working in Alaska. Yet, when he does show up, he wants to be a good dad. And be active in shaping his kid's lives. In one of his earliest scenes, the dad pulls his car over to the side of the road because he doesn't want to do "this", be the biological dad who has to be ticked off of a list along with the kid's chores every weekend. Simply: different from all other movie dads, who are never anything but abusive arseholes or passive scenery dressing.

This is why I like Linklater (and why I'm sure many don't): his films let in life instead of trying to edit it out. Boyhood deals with so much: being a high school nerd but dating one of the popular girls; letting a girl paint your nails in sight of your possibly alcoholic military step-dad; the petering out of sibling rivalry (and how it never disappears completely); having a parent for a teacher while going through your experiments with alcohol and weed stage; being able to have nerdy conversations with your dad about Star Wars while out camping. Linklater doesn't rely on the amount of time the film spans to interest the viewer - his story follows the particulars of a specific young lifetime. It would be stupid to think all films should let in everything they can and explore every facet of a character's life, film's usually have clear goals and purposes, but there's something special in a film that does this. And something very special about it being done on the unmatched scale Boyhood does it on.