Boyhood follows a boy named Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from the ages of six to eighteen. And when I say "follows," I mean it is literally the same actor from the ages of six to eighteen. Shot over a period of twelve years, this movie is one of the most ambitious and intriguing cinematic projects you could hope to witness. Watching that boy turn into a man over the course of two and a half hours is spellbinding. Watching his older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) grow up into a woman is similarly miraculous. It is a unique experience that is crazy in scope and brilliant in execution and will likely never be replicated again.
The movie plays like a series of vignettes that capture slices of Mason's life as he grows up. There might not be a key moment every year - sometimes there are just meandering conversations or a Harry Potter midnight release party. But we always glimpse another change in Mason's life that will shape the man he will become. His divorced parents, Olivia and Mason Sr. (played magnificently by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke), are going through their own upheavals that make each year another challenge and another adventure. But as Mason and Samantha hurtle towards adulthood, it's remarkable to see them turn into fully-formed human beings who will carry these experiences with them for the rest of their lives.
The movie's soundtrack is another master stroke, weaving in tracks that were popular each year and giving you a foothold in time as you progress through the movie. The technology is a similar clue, as you watch Mason move on from Game Boys to Wiis. As Linda Holmes and Stephen Thompson mentioned in their Pop Culture Happy Hour discussion of this film, this is the first real piece of nostalgia for the mid-2000s, which is a bizarre thought. And yet, as a child of the 90s, I felt incredibly old as I realized "Oops!..I Did It Again" came out 14 years ago, and that these children were excited about Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when they were eleven years old while I was already a sophomore in college.
Boyhood is not a universal tale of childhood. It is a distinctly white American childhood that I could barely relate to, apart from the pop cultural references. I would love to see every country make their own version of this movie that follows a child over the course of twelve years and presents the unique challenges he or she faces. But Boyhood is a twelve-year time capsule, a wonderful rendering of the ordinariness of life and the unstoppable passage of time that will turn every child into a young adult. The movie has no definitive ending - Mason is eighteen and sadly Linklater won't keep filming to show us how his life turns out in another twelve years. But I am inexpressibly grateful that we at least got to see him grow up.
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