Boyhood Review

If you mix Francois Truffaut’s “Four Hundred Blows” with Michael Apted’s “Up Series” and dump the whole thing in Texas, you might get the hottest wonder movie of the year: Boyhood.

Richard Linklater, who celebrated his breakthrough almost twenty years ago with Slacker, now delivers his masterpiece.

The greatest coming-of-age movie in American cinematic history.

It took twelve years to shoot it with the same actors.

An amazing feat of endurance.

Is there a plot?

Not really.

A boy simply grows up.

But it’s a story with an amazing mythic quality.

From the first hilarious scene in which young Mason is scolded for ruining a pencil sharpener with rocks, to the final scene in which a much older and very stoned Mason meets his second girlfriend in the desert.

The audience is captivated by the characters in Boyhood.

Mason, his older sister, and his mother travel from one Texas town to the next, living through one dysfunctional father and husband after another with a frightening, bittersweet, and hilarious train of cross-cutting scenes.

The struggle for emotional survival is ever-present.

Mason is bullied at school, has tense run-ins with his stepfathers and teachers, and is eventually dumped by his first, gorgeous girlfriend.

It’s the familiar crucible of growing up.

Mason is a dreamer from the very first scene, slowly retreating into his private world of photography to keep his sanity in the accelerating chaos of a painful life over which he often has little control.

What is achieved?

Linklater has created a three-hour Zen-like meditation that sometimes drags, but never disappoints.

We don’t know where Mason is going, and we don’t care, because we live with him in the moment.

The audience gets a flash of inspiration.

We are all Mason at this deepest level.