REVIEW – Boyhood, We May Have Already Seen The Best Film Of This Year

We often forget with the exceptionally quick turn around time of most Hollywood projects that smaller films take a lot more time to get off the ground. That's not necessarily a a bad thing. It gives those filmmakers extra time to really fine tune their work and allow them to their films to make a maximum impact at the box office. David Lynch's Erasherhead for example took five years to make, purely because he refused to give in to studio executives orders, he was making the film and he was certainly making the film his way. However, with the amount of reboots, sequels and prequels hitting the cinema over the last ten years, a film like Boyhood is certainly one that we should consider treasuring. However, that is not the only reason we should be worshipping at the altar of Boyhood. Linklater has this incredible ability to bring normal, everyday life to the big screen and make it incredibly interesting. In the same vein as Tarantino allowed his characters to go ahead and discuss what the French call hamburgers, Linklater has just allowed life to occur on screen. In the future, if all historians have to refer to are films, Linklater's Before Sunset trilogy and the Boyhood are the films they will depend on for depictions for normal life, perhaps one that is brimming with positivity. Filmed over the course of twelve years, Boyhood tells the story of young Mason from the age of 5. Throughout the years, Mason goes through what many would consider a very normal life. He moves away from where he grew up, he goes to school, he falls in love, he becomes the unruly teenager and he eventually leaves for college. Mason's life however is determined by the life of his mother (Patricia Arquette) and the relationships she embarks on, one with an abusive college lecturer who develops an alcohol problem and another with a man who just doesn't seem to take too kindly to Mason. Over the course of the film we discover that the one constant in Mason and his sister, Samantha's life, is his father played by Ethan Hawke. Yes, he isn't there every morning when the pair wake up but he can always be relied on to turn up for special occasions and to visit whenever the children need him. For the most part, this is just a typical existence. What Boyhood achieves is nothing less than extraordinary. Yes, it is filmed over the course of 12 years but it also manages to hold the viewer for the entirety of the film, a total of three hours which in a lot of cases could just feel like a little bit too long. The cast is exactly the same over the years, Mason is played by the same boy up to the age of 18, Samantha by the same girl while Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette both returned to film once a year, every year. There is something almost heartbreaking about the fact that this is Arquette's best role and yet no one has known about it for years. The performances are nothing less than effortlessly brilliant. You can imagine by the end of the film, these characters are almost like old friends and ones that the actors know exceptionally well. Ellar Coltrane's turn as Mason is relentless both as a child and a teenager while Hawke is practically playing the role of his entire career. On top of that, the fleeting guest characters throughout are exemplary, like Marco Perella who plays the Professor who develops an alcohol problem. There is nothing not to like here, the film is even shot to within an inch of its life, it simply looks stunning. This is a modern American classic and one that whole-heartedly deserves all of the praise which has been layered on to it. We might just have seen the best film of this year. We urge you to see it on the big screen.