The Movie Boyhood

“Boyhood” is a 2014 American coming-of-age drama film, written and directed by Richard Linklater, and starring Patricia Arquette, Ellar Coltrane, Lorelei Linklater, and Ethan Hawke. Filmed from 2002 to 2013, Boyhood depicts the childhood and adolescence of Mason Evans, Jr. (Coltrane) from ages six to eighteen as he grows up in Texas with divorced parents (Arquette and Hawke) Richard Linklater’s very own daughter Lorelei plays Mason's sister, Samantha. For the most part of the movie it centrals around Mason Jr journey of being a boy in first grade to a man going of to college. In the second shot of the movie “Boyhood” it doubles as the movie’s poster. With a young boy who is later intenfy as Mason Jr., just laying on the grass staring at the

By the time we realize where we are on the timeline when we hear somebody talking about the Iraq war, or hear a song on the soundtrack that was big during a certain year, or realize that the boy has changed his haircut or gotten a little bit bigger and mature. The simultaneously nourishing and corrosive effects of time make the film quietly moving and humble-seeming, despite its three-hour length and conceptual audacity. Time is what makes the film so cohere even when a particular scenes, images or performances seem clunky or undernourished. Fixating on imperfections while discussing "Boyhood" would be as petty as criticizing the sculpting of individual stones in a

Time plays an important character in this movie. With time, and our interaction with time, and the way in which we are all ultimately overmatched and worn down by time, and the notion of cinema as a means of sculpting with time: these and other aspects of temporality are at the heart of "Boyhood." Time is the core around which all of this movie's musings on childhood and parenthood are woven. It's the river down which the scenes and characters travel without consciously realizing that they are on individual journeys that all have the same ending. If life is "about" anything, it's about realizing and accepting that fact: that everything is fleeting. Time gives birth and nourishes and then obliterates as it moves ahead, like the family which, in an early scene, prepares to move out of a house by covering murals and hand-lettered height charts with white paint. By the time the film ends and the end credits come up you will be asking yourself the same question that you ask yourself after a long evening spent with old, friends where did the time