By all accounts, and the critical response has been startling, Austin has its first homegrown out-and-out masterpiece. The film is Rick Linklater’s BOYHOOD. I have not seen this yet.
Here is the review from my favorite film writer, Anthony Lane, in the New Yorker. The boy of “Boyhood” is Mason (Ellar Coltrane), whose story we follow, in fits and starts, until he is no longer a boy at all; the movie, written and directed by Richard Linklater, was shot over twelve years. When we initially meet Mason, he is in first grade, living in Texas with his older sister, Samantha (Lorelei Linklater), and his mother, Olivia (Patricia Arquette). His parents are divorced, and the children have not seen their father, Mason, Sr. (Ethan Hawke), for months. In other words, we are joining Mason on a voyage that has already hit the rocks, and on a tough, daily quest to refloat and sail on. Rarely does a childhood like this involve what Wordsworth called “the glory and the freshness of a dream.” Instead, it means being woken up in the early morning by your sister, who annoys you with her Britney Spears impression, whereupon your mom storms in and tells you to go back to sleep. Some dream. Olivia moves the family from town to town. She goes back to school, and marries her professor, a silver-haired smiler who calcifies into a drunk; in one remarkable sequence, Mason and his stepbrother cycle blithely home, on a balmy day, just in time to see Olivia lying on the floor of the garage, felled by a blow from her husband. She then takes up with an Iraq veteran, who becomes a corrections officer, and whom we see sitting on the front porch, clutching his can of beer, seething at an uncorrectable world. So many of the men in “Boyhood” seem like losers, or bullies, or both, minds and mouths locked tight with disapproval and denial, and the challenge for Mason—and, you feel, for any kid—is not just to survive the squalls of youth but somehow to grow from boy to man without suffering a death of the spirit. More complex is the case of Mason, Sr.—a devoted performance from Hawke, surrendering to time’s flow. At first blush, he is flighty and feckless, and there are scores of blushes to come, as in the tricky moment at an Astros game, amid a raucous crowd, when Mason turns to his dad and asks whether he has a job. Yet his love for the kids is a constant, even if his practical care is a fragment of what their mother provides, and we are not surprised—though we are vastly relieved—when Mason and Samantha wing it to the brink of adult life. The profuse pleasures of “Boyhood” spring not from amazement but from recognition—from saying, Yes, that’s true, and that feels right, or that’s how it was for me, too. One evening in 2005, Mason and Samantha, suitably gowned, line up at a bookstore, like millions of kids, to get their midnight copies of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” leaving us with a difficult question: We traced the arc of Harry’s youth, too, in even greater detail than Linklater can furnish, so how come we feel that we know Mason so much better? Perhaps because Harry’s life, on the page and, even more luridly, onscreen, was measured out in highlights, as the plot demanded, whereas Mason is revealed in a string of lowlights, or in those episodes which seem dim and dull at the time, and only later shine in memory’s cave. A haircut, in short, matters more than a Quidditch match. We happen upon ourselves when nothing much happens to us, and we are transformed in the process; that is why the Mason with the earring from whom we take our leave, on his first, blissed-out day of college, both is and is not the affable imp of seven, or the mumbler who bumped his way through puberty, and that twin sense of continuity and interruption—of life itself as tracking shot and jump cut—applies to everyone. Just like the final fade. ♦ Kirby McDaniel MovieArt Original Film Posters P.O. Box 4419 Austin TX 78765-4419 512 479 6680 www.movieart.com https://www.facebook.com/movieart.austin.texas mobile 512 589 5112 Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com ___________________________________________________________________ How to UNSUBSCRIBE from the MoPo Mailing List Send a message addressed to: [email protected] In the BODY of your message type: SIGNOFF MOPO-L The author of this message is solely responsible for its content.
