Watching Lives, and Actors, Change

The movie “Boyhood” is the fictional record of an average American boy named Mason (Ellar Coltrane) as he ages from 6 to 18. Living with his mother and sister in a series of Texas towns, we watch as Mason works out a relationship with his fly-by-night father, endures the bad stepfathers his mother chooses, moves from school to school, finds his passion, photography, and starts college. An ordinary coming-of-age film you may think. But there is nothing ordinary about “Boyhood.” In the hands of writer-director Richard Linklater and his longtime editor, Sandra Adair, the film breaks new ground in how a film deals with time and narrative, how the everyday, keenly observed over time, can become transcendent. Conceived from the beginning as a 12-year project, “Boyhood” was filmed between 2001 and 2013. Although Linklater knew the general outlines of his story, he wanted to find the same balance between planning and improvisation that gave his “Before” trilogy its vibrancy. Gathering his cast once a year to hammer out a final script that seemed natural to the characters and film, Linklater worked in his signature style, understated observation. Nowhere does the film call attention to either its ambition or its uniqueness; like life, it simply is. Other films of course have followed characters over time, but these were made of snapshots of actors aged for the camera. It’s a different and stunning experience to see actors age before your eyes, almost scene-by-scene; or to see great performances that have been “in the can” for years finally reach the screen. Take Patricia Arquette, who plays Olivia, Mason’s mom. When the film begins she looks barely 30 as the recently divorced mother of two, Mason and Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter). Or Ethan Hawke as Mason Sr., the dad recently returned from Alaska. Twelve years later she has gained lots of weight, married and shed two more husbands, gotten a PhD and wonders if “that’s all there is.” Hawke, too, is heavier, grizzled, but settled into a happy second marriage and fatherhood. Both are terrific. Even though Linklater observes how families break and reassemble over and over, don’t think this is a heavy-handed film. It is actually a breezy sort of time capsule of 12 years in the United States noting changes in video game consoles – from PlayStation to Wii – and in music. (The movie has a fabulous soundtrack that begins and ends with “Hero” from Family of the Year.) Mason’s family lives through 9/11, presidential elections ­­— Linklater lets his political preferences show in an amusing scene with election signs — and moving from Austin to Houston to San Marcos, 31 miles south of Austin. While the cast is uniformly excellent, the film really belongs to Mason. How Linklater got so lucky or so prescient with Coltrane we’ll never know, but both kid and young man can act, in the same way Gary Cooper could act, quietly, intently. Mason observes, and you see decisions being made behind knowing eyes. (Just look at his face after an abusive stepfather forces him to have a buzz haircut. You know at once what kind of man he will never be.) Mason grows into a sort of determined, flinty, quiet sort of rebel. He will tell the truth, yes, he tells his mom, he has been drinking and smoking weed – and follow his passion. He will be the quintessential American ideal, the moral individualist. Yet Coltrane and Linklater achieve this without preaching or pomposity or grandiosity. Like everything else in the film, it just seems natural. In the film’s final scenes, Mason and some new friends are in Palo Duro Canyon at sunset ­— he has just started college in what must be Alpine, Texas ­— when someone says we don’t seize the moment so much as the moment seizes us. Mason marvels out loud — under the influence of mild magic mushrooms to be sure — that moments pile up, keep piling up, until they create something in our minds so big we can scarcely contain it. It’s called life. “Boyhood” will come to our area soon. It is rated R.