Title: Boyhood
Director: Richard Linklater
Starring: Ellar Coltrane, Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette, Lorelei Linklater.
Filmed over 12 years with the same cast, Richard Linklater’s ‘Boyhood’ is a groundbreaking story on the delicate passage from childhood to adulthood. The story is seen through the eyes of a boy named Mason (Ellar Coltrane), who literally grows up on screen before our eyes.
Starring Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette as Mason’s parents and newcomer Lorelei Linklater as his sister Samantha, ‘Boyhood’ depicts the portrait of a veraciously-complex family.
Richard Linklater had already demonstrated of having a great take on dissecting the human intermix through time: his stupendous trilogy movies ‘Before Sunrise,’ ‘Before Sunset,’ ‘Before Midnight,’ also had non-formulaic narratives about seemingly random occurrences, which majestically portrayed day-to-day truth.
‘Boyhood’ charts the rocky terrain of puberty and adolescence like no other film has done before. The messy tapestry of growing pains and pubescent grumbling, is spaced out through road trips, family dinners, birthdays, graduations, that become milestones in the bigger journey of a youngster turning into a man.
The movie is perfectly contextualised in the years it traverses, with a soundtrack that spans from Coldplay’s Yellow to Arcade Fire’s Deep Blue, along with the politics that follow the Bush administration up to Obama’s first election campaign.
The nostalgic time capsule of the recent past is an ode to growing up and parenting. Mark Twain seems to bequeath to the sensitive Linklater ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ that get moulded into the 21st century’s emprise of the young Mason; who gets us thinking about our own journey.
Technical: A
Acting: A+
Story: A+
Overall: A+
Written by: Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi
