Richard Linklater’s latest film chronicles the process of growing up like no other movie.
Ellar Coltrane in Boyhood.
IFC Films
Richard Linklater's Boyhood is a big movie in all sort of ways, but most of all, in terms of time. Shot over a dozen years and running just over two and a half hours long, it stretches out in that dimension in a way that no other film has, outside of maybe the Up documentary series. In showing 12 years in the life of Mason Jr., an ordinary Texas boy making his way toward young adulthood, it also captures how star Ellar Coltrane and the movie's other cast members change and age, entering teenagerdom or middle age over the course of the film, ending it as both the same and very different people from who they were when it began.
But Boyhood, which opens this Friday in New York and L.A. and in more cities the week after, also brings to mind a six-minute YouTube video. A specific one — "Everyday," in which photographer Noah Kalina took a daily snapshot of himself, and compiled six years of results into a viral sensation. Set to a moody piano track composed by Kalina's then-girlfriend, the video uses the most mundane of materials — selfies taken against backdrops of cluttered New York rooms — to summon a sensation that's melancholy and profound. It's a look at how time works on one person and a reminder that it's doing the same to us all.
Noah Kalina's "Everyday."
Noah Kalina
Kalina's continued the project — in 2012, he released a new, longer version that encompasses 12 and a half years, which is about the span of Boyhood's production. It's labeled "A Work in Progress," a promise of more and a reminder that the point of the video is to document a process that only stops when its creator does.
There's a similar feeling of open-endedness to Boyhood, which begins with Mason as a 6-year-old and ends when he's heading to college, a lanky teenager giving off glimpses of the man he'll eventually be. Boyhood doesn't really follow an arc, though it catches the ups and downs that would describe anyone's life. In its opening shot, it pulls out to reveal its protagonist lying on the grass on an unexceptional but beautiful day, and when it comes to a close, it's not after something major has happened to Mason or because he's reached a particular moment of understanding. It ends because leaving home is as good a time as any for the film to bow out, just as its subject is beginning a next step in his life.
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