Boyhood – directed and written by Richard Linklater. Drama. 165 minutes Color 2014
★★
The Story: A six year-old boy grows over the years to become eighteen.
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Atrocious.
I covered my face with shame watching it. It is devoid of originality and it is very, very, very badly written. The Emperor has lots of clothes and they are all chic cliché.
It is the same old problem of a writer imagining he can direct – or it may be the other way around. The two talents rarely go together. Some try it. Only Woody Allen succeeds. Here they are so many miles apart I cannot make out that they exist in Richard Linklater at all.
What we have here is a marvelous idea, which is to chose a six year old boy, and make a movie about his doings over the years as he grows, until he is eighteen.
That this is not done as a sort of home-movie is fine. But what the director shows instead has nothing to do with anything that he has not learned from cheap TV dramas. Andy Hardy Has A Pillow Fight With His Sister. Andy Hardy Looks At Playboy With His Friends In A Back Alley. Andy Hardy Goes To College.
There is nothing original or particular in it. There is no eccentricity in it. There is nothing that does not record the customary, the rule, the expected. There is nothing that exists outside of the acceptable. Every scene is a slogan. Every line a dread banality. And there is nothing personal to the young man in it whatsoever.
I was ashamed to have to sit there pulling the wool off my eyes. People applauded at the end and laughed on cue all through. Big Brother was impersonating Boyhood.
Ellar Coltrane, who plays the young male, is just fine. He is introverted and beautiful, both of which draw one to him. His sister Samantha is played by Lorelei Linklater, and she is the opposite of introverted, and she is just fine too. There is nothing to forgive them for. Nor is there in the case of Patricia Arquette as their mother. Everything she does is simple, clear, believable, and true. She’s a fine actress. My hat’s off to her.
As to the three men who play her husbands, their performances are so bad I will not defame myself by describing them. Let us just say they are over-detailed without being particular. Which means they are hammy. Bill Wise, though, as the Uncle has a marvelous moment at the end. And the end is long in coming. For we have traversed A Currier And Ives Calendar Of Typical Boyhood Moments, climaxed by a scene in which we are treated to the father urinating on a campfire. He instructs his teen-age son to follow suit. This act of ecological mercy is followed by the boy’s eye view of his pissing. It’s yellow, yep. Yet a boy’s eye view would have shown his penis. But no. It’s Andy Hardy, the difference being that no one thought Andy Hardy was real, only that Mickey Rooney was. Like everything else about this film it was impersonal, hollow, and unnecessary.
The film is a gimmick without content. The three leads deserve something better. The subject of boyhood deserves something better. I deserve something better. And so do you.