When my oldest daughter graduated from high school, I made a movie about her life. I’m the amateur filmmaker in the house, the one carting the black camera bag everywhere since those early sleepless days. Sifting through years of footage took weeks. I was dry-eyed at her ceremony; all the tears were left on the editing floor. Stringing up a sheet for an outdoor screen, we shared it with her classmates, our family and fellow parents that had been with us on the journey. Our guests were kind (no better audience than friends), but the comment that stayed with me was from one dad of a classmate:
I felt every stage of her life. I felt it was my kid up there.
Coming of age stories are cultural tropes. This is turf we know. We remember our innocence,when we lost it, the tints and sounds. How we arrived and what shape our meanderings took is the gold to mine for real artistry. Director Richard Linklater has struck it rich with his latest, Boyhood, a profound achievement in filmmaking. I saw it with that same daughter and gripped her hand, there in the dark, tears streaming down both our faces. At the end, the woman seated next to me sighed happily and then got up to leave. She turned back to me to wave goodbye, blurting out I feel as if we’re all one family now after seeing this.
Rarely has there been a film this intimate. I felt immediately alive. This was my own life, our family, our kids, up there. If you have a sister, a brother, a mom or a dad, kids, grandparents..there isn’t a soul who won’t get it.
Over twelve years, Linklater shot footage of Ellar Coltrane, the beautiful boy who plays Mason, who changes his hair and loses his baby fat, but never that inquiring gaze.
Gathering his cast every year for a few days to shoot and edit a new chapter, the director had only one promise: assured financing. Would the cast stay with the project? No one could know how actor Ellar Coltrane would turn out. Linklater had a rough script and an end shot in mind, but he wrote it as they went along, covering Mason’s childhood and adolescence all the way to the first day of college. Scenes unfold seamlessly with the simplest of touch, as time slips through with no screen titles or artificial signposts to alert a new year. We begin to forget that Mason is played by an actor, that his parents ( Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette) are not really dear friends we have come to love deeply. Linklater avoids the Big Drama moment and pulls back continuously, tracing the smaller moments that measure out a life. Unassuming yet deliberate and powerful and unabashedly American,this is a valentine to the fabric of everyday lives. The film is consistently focused on Mason’s experiences as he moves with his single mom and sister from house to house, bumping through life, muddling through the big questions shared by all teenagers confronting their future. Audiences will love the music and technology cues as they track the years and wider cultural touchstones: lining up for a Harry Potter book (my kid and I laughed out loud at this) and wondering if they ever will make another Star Wars movie. Hairstyles and belly fat change, friends come and go, as do Mom’s husbands, but throughout there is the throughline of a vibrant heartbeat.
Go see Boyhood, opening in Toronto on July 25th, and see if you agree with me in naming this great new American classic, easily my favourite film of 2014 so far. My only wish: that Mason could have been a girl coming of age too, that the narrative of a girl’s life is different, yes, but warranting no less a glorious treatment. I attempted a wonky version for mine. It is our own magic story to hold.
