The art of growing up

Submitted by cathy n on 13 August, 2014 - 1:47 Author: Beth Redmond

Boyhood is an intimate depiction of a young boy, Mason, growing up between the ages of 6 and 18, in a fatherless family struggling for money. His mother (Patricia Arquette), over the span of the film, has to juggle single-parenthood, studying for a masters and coping with a string of drunken, violent husbands.

Before I went to see the film I asked someone for a briefing and was told that “nothing really happens”, “it’s too long” and “they should have made it about the sister”. But that briefing is wrong on all counts.

Richard Linklater, who also made the Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight trilogy and A Scanner Darkly, is a genius. He started shooting this film in 2002 and used the same set of actors over the next 12 years to create a unique ensemble between the cast and the viewers. I had no idea how profound the effect would be of being able to see a boy of 6 morph into an adult over 12 years. I didn’t feel like I was watching the film, I felt like I was living it. I felt like I was living it in the cinema for the entire 12 years, and not in a bad way.

And that is a testament to how well the film is made, the attention to detail means that every little action is believable; the actors are natural and fluid together. I go to the cinema for a break from my own life, but this is one of the only films I have ever truly got lost in. The others were David Lynch films but I don’t think I got lost for the same reason.

Touching on themes of misogyny, abuse and addiction and their often very subtle effects on family members and how they shape growing children makes this film very unique. It never confronts the “big” problems head on, Mason never asks his mum about his step-dad beating her, in the same way that he probably wouldn’t in real life. Maybe that is where ‘nothing really happens’ came from, because the family don’t talk about their problems, they just get on with it.

The concept of Boyhood was a massive risk for Linklater, he invested 12 years of his working life into this project, and for me it paid off ten times over.

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