Shot over 12 years, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is less a sweeping story than a series of episodes offering annual check-ins on the progress of Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from age 6 to his first day of college at age 18. Apart from a mid-film section in which an alcoholic stepfather figures prominently, there’s little conventional drama. Mason and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter) bounce back and forth between his father (Ethan Hawke) and mother (Patricia Arquette, doing standout work). He develops interests, has his heart broken, and watches as the world changes around him, growing a little more observant with each passing year.
Boyhood won this poll by a healthy margin, which raises a question: Why? Were we all still so dazzled by the consensus choice for the best film of 2014? Or was there something else at work in Boyhood turning up on so many ballots? Its structure makes it unique, but it might also have made it merely an interesting experiment. Ultimately, its everydayness is what makes it so compelling. Mason’s story is particular to his character—and to the corner of the world and era in which he grows up—but the passing of time is universal, as are many of the rites of passage he encounters along the way. Linklater almost goes out of his way to gloss past many of those rites of passage—Mason’s first kiss, his first drink, the loss of his virginity—leaving viewers to piece together what’s happened from the way he behaves. But they’re still felt. The drama comes less from individual incidents than what it’s like to live in the wake of change. Much of how we experience life is in that idea: Time is less a series of milestones passed than the long stretches between those milestones. Boyhood compresses 12 years of life, but it also slows them down, pausing at telling points to capture what life means for this boy at this point in time, and finding a much bigger story in those small moments. —Keith Phipps
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