Linklater conceived the projected after his first of the Before trilogy films, and the similarity in style is palpable. The camera is unobtrusive and avoids loud movements or cinematic techniques (a few oddly placed whip pans aside). Usually, the camera lucidly follows the actors, and it’s almost always in long takes. There doesn’t ever appear to be any artificial lighting, and the camera never, ever, seems “set up.” In other words, the hand of the artist is invisible. On one hand, locations are blandly photographed and the image always appears soft. But what Boyhood lacks in cinematic dexterity it makes up through feeling real. By real, I don’t mean the type of realism that Orson Welles tried to emulate in Citizen Kane, but a realism of the moment. In the film’s elegant final scene, Linklater ruminates on the power of the present. It’s telling that every stylistic technique, from the unannounced shifts in time to the invisible camera, exists to prove Linklater’s point. By orienting viewers to experience the film in the moment, watching Boyhood acts as a running metaphor for how we live life.





I had expected a narrative arc to form, one that will inevitably become befallen with tragedy and hardship, but none ever came. The structure of the story bears more similarity to a memory than to a screenplay, where details are ignored, skipped over, and the focus can be, at times, frustratingly arbitrary. In what may be the finest stroke of genius in a film made up of them, the transitions from age to age and year to year are unannounced. What seems like a treasure trove of key dramatic moments are almost completely ignored, instead focusing on the beauty of the mundane. This, too, is like a memory. How many times when trying to recall a particular event, whether it was a fight with a parent, your first kiss, or starting college, do you think, “Why do I remember that?” By tying the film so closely to the cognitive processes for memory, I felt a sensation I’ve never felt by a movie before. It was almost as though I’m watching memories unfold in real time, like a stream of consciousness, and it felt as though they were my own. That’s the magic of Boyhood.





A+





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