ELLAR COLTRANE AND RICHARD LINKLATER

Pleasures and days

Richard Linklater's Boyhood is a film about family life and a boy growing up from age six to age eighteen. It was shot over a twelve-year period, four days or so of shooting a year, with the principals all played by the same actors for all twelve years, and some reappearing minor characters played by the same actors too. This has been done before, but not quite the same way. There are Truffaut's Antoine Doinel films, which start when Jean-Pierre Léaud as Doinel was fourteen and continued for twenty years; and most remarkably, there is Michael Apted's ongoing Up documentary series, that has followed a socially diverse group of English people from age seven, revisiting them every seven years thereafter up into, so far, their mid-fifties. The primary interest of Boyhood is that it does the same sort of thing but within a single feature film. Anything that might have gotten in the way of the success of this stunt had to be avoided. Nothing must get in the way of simply observing the physical growing up of Ellar Coltrane, as Mason, six when first seen and eighteen at the end, and to a lesser extent Lorelei Linklater, the director's daughter, as Samantha, his year-older sister -- and to an even lesser extent (but the transformations are impressive, even if subtle) the aging of Ethan Hawke as Mason Senior, the boy's divorced father who has his own life, and Patricia Arquette as the siblings' mother, with whom they live till they're eighteen.

This loyalty to the project is a price that is paid. Given all the raves about Boyhood since it has begun showing in cinemas, the actual film may seem a bit of a letdown. This is no bold, powerful Malickian Tree of Life. It is a homage to the quotidan. If it ever begins to sing, the song takes a long time gathering. A certain drabness comes from how easy and casual Linklater makes his complicated storytelling and logistical efforts seem. No-nos included deeply memorable secondary characters, extremely dramatic scenes or events, or letting the sequence from any one year run to significantly greater length. The emphasis is all on the process, dipping in, dipping out, then dipping back in. Any big dramatic events that might throw the year-by-year panorama out of kilter are avoided.

So instead there are a lot of little scenes. The appeal of the film is its ordinariness. Not that these scenes are absurdist or insignificant. Linklater is not an avant-gardist. He is conventional. Like Wilder in Our Town he is telling the story of lives, with the usual high points, even if most are approached crab-wise. The first dramatic moment is the day when Mason Senior first appears and takes the two excited kids for an outing for the first time in a year and a half. Dislocations are dramatic and the single mom's family has to relocate repeatedly, first leaving the small town the kids grew up in and taking them to Houston so she can pursue a degree. There, she marries one of her professors. She's not good at picking men, and he turns out to be by far the worst, a terrible, self-hating, abusive drunk she and Mason and Samantha must flee for their lives. He's bossy and mean, and Mason doesn't like him. He traumatizes the boy by getting his long girlish hair shaved completely off. When Sam and Mason become teenagers, that's dramatic in itself, since we first see Mason when he's six, and it may be a shock when suddenly Mason has a deep voice. This is letting nature and time do the acting.

Linklater does also have his agendas. Mason Senior lectures the kids on the evils of George Bush and the wrongness of the Iraq war and helps them plant Obama/Biden posters on consenting citizens' lawns when Bush is on the way out. After the drunken professor, mom marries a young macho vet who becomes a corrections officer; he drinks too, but isn't dangerous. There is also a running theme of the "artist" and how small-minded people, like Mason's photography teacher in high school, try to crush them. Mason gets a lot of tiresome lectures. Even his high school sweetheart seems to lecture him when she dumps him for a member of the lacrosse team, saying disapprovingly that he's sad all the time.

Mason isn't sad, though all the instability and the horrific alcoholic stepfather could mark a sensitive youth. He's simply serious, focused, and stable. He may be seen as irresponsible by adults because of late hours and neglecting to submit papers, then obsessively working in the darkroom when he acquires a passion for photography. This may grow out of the personality of Ellar Coltrane himself. He plays Mason as a young man with an inner smile who never flies off the handle. Thus he seems to react naturally, doesn't "act." He wasn't an actor, at least when he started. He became one and could continue to be one, acting becoming the "art" he was embracing as his character, Mason, embraces photography. For better or worse, this is a movie where you have to talk about the actors and their real-life details. It may lend credibility that Hawke and Linklater are both Texans with divorced parents and fathers in insurance. It may explain a certain inward security in Ellar Coltrane to know that, unlike his character, he was home schooled. Linklater took a chance on the six-year-old becoming someone interesting as he grew up, and he got lucky.

Coltrane is central to the project and if his quiet charm never grabs you, you won't think much of Boyhood, but he has presence -- luckily, since he's in nearly every scene. But Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette are important too, and Arquette in particular is impressive and real in a complex role as a young mother who must struggle with college and a job and single motherhood and bad husbands and becoming a good college teacher and must live to weep when her nest becomes empty. Hawke may be just right as the weekend father, even if he seems unconvincing. The trick is that by the time he can really talk to his son and daughter, he seems to gain confidence in the role as Mason Senior assumes responsibility in life.

Boyhood is not the masterpiece if might have been. With its lack of plot, the two hour and forty minute length starts to feel long. But it pursues an idea that, as Linklater knew, could not fail to fascinate if he stuck to it faithfully. The picture of growing up depicted, as it were, over real time, achieves a certain universality, and people who have raised a family or grown up with divorced parents in the modern era or had close friends who did will find their buttons pushed and their memories jogged. And for its originality and the special time-lapse aspect of its performances Boyhood is likely to be well remembered at Oscars time.

Boyhood, 165 mins., debuted at Sundance 19 January 2014 and was featured at other festivals including Berlin, SXSW, San Francisco, Sidney, BAM and Karlovy. Limited US release by IFC began 11 July 2014. Metacritic rating an extravagant 100% (but see Armond White). Released in France 23 July, it has received excellent reviews there too (Allociné press rating 4.1 from 24 critics). Kenneth Turan of the LA Times checked in later and expresses a respectful but underwhelmed viewpoint similar to mine, rare among the general raves.


ELLAR AT OUTSET

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.