What an extraordinary film-maker Richard Linklater has become, a thoroughly modern rule-breaker with an old-fashioned sense of craftsmanship who provides the missing link between a 21st-century independent aesthetic and studio-era storytelling skills. From the low-budget edginess of Slacker and the lo-fi animated experiments of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, through to the mainstream breakthrough of School of Rock, to the historical fiction of Me and Orson Welles and the murderous tragicomedy of Bernie, Linklater has proved himself to be as eclectic as he is prolific.
Crucially, his films (whatever the genre) are defined by an underlying sympathy for his protagonists, a thread of unfashionable humanism running through his work like a latterday Frank Capra, albeit with an acerbic Wilder-esque edge that dispels the whiff of sentimentality.
A Silver Bear winner at this year's Berlin film festival, Linklater's latest was shot in 39 days over a period of 12 years and has already been hailed as his crowning achievement, although it is entirely possible that he will surprise us yet further in future. Nominally a thought-provoking account of a young man's journey from watchful childhood to (more) self-possessed adulthood, Boyhood is equally insightful about the changing nature of motherhood, fatherhood, sisterhood and brotherhood, each theme explored with the same attention to time-spanning detail, ensuring that no one is incidental and everyone is utterly believable.
We first meet Mason Jr (the charismatic Ellar Coltrane) as a fascinating six-year-old, observing the world around him, learning how to react to its demands, its challenges, its curve balls. Over the course of the next-two-and-three-quarter hours (Linklater's vibrant film ironically shares a running time – and nothing else – with the stagnant Transformers: Age of Extinction) we see Mason and his family grow up before our very eyes, both narratively and literally. Leaping ahead at irregular (and intelligently unannounced) intervals, the movie drops in on its core family members like visiting relatives, the passages of time apart doing nothing to restrict the immediacy of its intimacy.
As the years fall away, we see this young boy become an early adolescent, a teenager and ultimately an adult, albeit one in whose still-boyish face the presence of the child we first met remains. Meanwhile, his sister (played with unaffected ease by Linklater's daughter, Lorelei) undergoes a parallel rite of passage, just as their separated parents endure their own life changes: mum (Patricia Arquette) variously wrestling with the rigours of single parenthood and the traumas of abusive relationships (the film speaks quiet volumes about patterns of addiction); dad (Ethan Hawke) turning from feckless Pontiac owner to mustachioed minivan driver, as his own arrested adolescence finally gives way to something more mature.
Linklater has explored the passage of time and the phenomenon of ageing on camera in the Before… trilogy, the creation and timeframe of which intertwines with that of Boyhood. Both projects feature Linklater's long-time muse Hawke in a central role, and both boast dialogue that sounds spontaneous and improvised while in fact being tightly scripted (there's a hint of Mike Leigh's process in Linklater's creative collaborations with his cast).
Several commentators have drawn comparisons between Boyhood and Michael Apted's ongoing seven-year-itch documentary series ...Up, although Linklater himself cites Truffaut's dramatic 20-year Antoine Doinel sequence (in which the director's alter ego from Les quatre cents coups became a recurring character in several subsequent films) as a closer cinematic cousin.
Meanwhile, Michael Winterbottom spent five years filming with the key cast of Everyday in order to portray the effect of a father's imprisonment upon a growing family, while Lars von Trier began and then abandoned his now-defunct Dimension project, for which he had originally planned to shoot three minutes a year from 1991 until 2024.
The genius of Boyhood is that while watching it, you simply forget about the head-scrambling logistics of the project. As always, Linklater makes the complex appear casual, allowing us to focus entirely upon the characters and the changing world that they so tangibly inhabit, and into which we are so deftly transported. Even the opening strains of Coldplay's Yellow seem to be heard with younger, more innocent ears, as if we are listening to the song in an age before Chris Martin and co became the touchstone for all things terrible. And while there is inevitable fascination to be found in the changing faces of fashion and technology that occur around them, our primary focus is always the people themselves and the strangely fluid consistency of their personal strengths and foibles.
Perhaps this is the key to Linklater's film-making – the peculiar absence of voyeurism that is so often a core facet of cinema. While other directors may appear to be looking at their characters, Linklater seems to be looking with them, sharing in their hopes and dreams, encouraging and allowing us to do the same.
