The most interesting thing about Boyhood was that it was filmed on and off again over a period of eleven and a half years, with the same actors throughout the production. It is chronicling the Mason's life from the age of eight and up until he moves off to college on his own. It is supposed to show the audience the boyhood of a more or less normal kid, how he changes and evolves as he grows up, and how different living situations affect him at different ages. It's undoubtedly an interesting idea, but that's pretty much where it stops.
The first few years were basically just an introduction to Mason and his family, how everything worked and who everyone was. They crammed a lot of stuff into those years, including a lot of pop-cultural references that felt forced the longer they went on. I get that the writer-director wanted to remind us what time period we were in, and that it wasn't the current one, but it mostly just seemed odd on-screen. It got to the point where rather than me going "oh, I remember that" I went "it's interesting that they managed to pick so many things that would still be somewhat relevant today". It got me, personally, to think more about the production behind the film than the story on the film, but that could very well be a problem entirely with me.
It's fun to see the character grow up in a real way on-screen instead of having a bunch of different actors portraying the same character at different ages, but when it was all put together I still felt like it was more or less a slightly above mediocre film. The acting was done well by the parents, Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, but the kids were more difficult to deal with. I thought the girl who played Mason's sister Sam, Lorelei Linklater, was okay, but she had less to do than Ellar Coltrane who played Mason. You can often forgive children's performances in film. I don't know exactly why we do it, but it's natural to us as an audience that children aren't typically good actors. We manage to suspend our disbelief even further than usual in order to still enjoy the film. But you see Ellar so much, and he grows up before you, it gets difficult to not see that he isn't getting better at acting. Look him up at his IMDb page and you'll find only four other films beside Boyhood. Spaced evenly between 2002 and 2009. If he hasn't been involved in a lot of other acting work, there hasn't been much practice in between shooting sessions on Boyhood. It's hard to blame the film for this, as you have no idea how a kid will develop in that way, but it still hurts the film experience.
There were also a lot of repetitive situations in the film. The characters kept finding themselves in the same bad scenarios with the same bad people, over and over again. I, again, understand that this is something that happens a lot in real life. People don't really recognise what went wrong before, and ends up seeking it out again, but when it happens in the compressed narrative of a film it gets old quick. Especially when we spend so much time in the scenarios each time. They start to seem pointless because you know where they're going. You end up just waiting for it to come to the end you know is coming, and starts noticing the other minor annoyances that might have gone unnoticed had you been fully involved with the plot. I know that this isn't the kind of film where the plot is really a plot-plot, like you'd find in Trans4mers or Avengers. It's a slice of life, an experience picture. You're living alongside the characters just watching life unfold. But their lives just aren't interesting enough for me to really care or get entertained in any heightened fashion. It's just a thing that's happening.
Overall, the film isn't really bad. No matter how much I might have just bashed it. But it's far from as good as the critics want you to believe. It's a completely decent film, that manages to at least keep you entertained enough that the almost three-hour run time doesn't feel too long. If you're into more artsy and experimental films you might like this one, but I don't think you'd lose too much of the experience by just waiting for it to get a home release. It doesn't use its screenspace particularly well, and will most likely work just as good on a monitor you have at home.
No comments:
Post a Comment