Photo: IFC Films
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Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is a movie that sounds like an exercise in excessive artistic experimentation and indulgence: take a group of actors in 2002 and film them over the next 12 years, a few weeks at a time, in an attempt to capture what the formative years of growing up are like. If it works, great. If not, then . . . whoops?
Fortunately, the movie works. And magnificently so. It isn’t so much a movie about something as it is a movie about everything: everything that happens to everyone as they make that treacherous walk from childhood to young adulthood. The boy of Boyhood is an 8-year-old Texas boy who witnesses not just growing pains and spurts, but all the upheavals of emotional and psychological warfare that come of growing up in the home of a single mother with abusive boyfriends and perpetually juvenile father who doesn’t seem to get, well, anything.
Some might complain that not much happens in the film – it’s basically a sequence of shorts featuring the same actor from ages 6 to 18 – but that’s kind of the point: nothing lasts forever, least of all childhood, which is made up of a lot of nothing which – when we look back – was sum total of everything.
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that looks good to me.