Boyhood
Director: Richard Linklater
Talent: Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke
Release Date: 11th July 2014
There’s a scene about halfway through Boyhood, a coming-of-age film shot in 39 days over the course of twelve years, in which its principal character Mason (Ellar Coltrane), now around seventeen years old, complains to his girlfriend of a contemporary life increasingly mediated by interaction with screens, and social media. His longing for *real* experience is placed directly at odds with a cultural fascination with perpetual documentation, as the making sense of the moment increasingly becomes the moment itself.
It is this instrumental logic that Linklater’s film undermines, with the passage of time functioning not as a corkboard for a linear series of vignettes, but something which is always already felt and in motion, rich with possibility and, towards its climax, great uncertainty. Boyhood is, despite appearances, really a film about disillusionment, the one major moment of naiveté of which — a condescending subplot featuring a migrant worker advised by Mason’s mother (Patricia Arquette) to pursue a formal education — does little to undermine its affect or ambition.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
For more cinema coverage this month, check out our reviews of:
Hector and the Search for Happiness, The Rover, Pudsey The Dog: The Movie, The Grand Seduction, Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, Grand Central, Finding Vivian Maier & Joe
