Boyhood

For years, the production of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood flew along under-the-radar, known to his devotees as the 12-Year Project. Beyond the fact that it would star long-time Linklater pal Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette and the filmmaker’s daughter Lorelei, little was known about what, exactly, the director would be doing for 12 years. For a filmmaker already obsessed with time, it seemed a natural; no questions need be asked about the project’s raison d’être The results of this decade-plus of episodic filming, Boyhood, charts Ellar Coltrane aging from six to 18, going from pillowfights with big sister to adolescent boozing to, eventually, the definitive moment of the threshold of adulthood – arriving at college. Time passes in an array of haircuts and pop songs. It may be a miracle Boyhood exists, but its drama hardly measures up to the production’s grandeur.

Instead, especially in its first half, Boyhood is marked by dud moments. Most galling is Marco Perella’s drunken stepdad, who threatens to drag the film down into sheer soap opera as he staggers wildly, chewing scenery. For a project so associated with patience, there’s no multi-year slowburn in this character – he starts out cursorily written, and soon devolves into villainy, his descent into screeching addiction coming on with the swiftness of Elizabeth Berkley’s caffeine pill meltdown in Saved By The Bell. It’s as if, in depicting childhood, Linklater gets trapped in the realm of the after-school special.