Woody’s [rating: 5]
Ellar Coltrane (Mason Jr.) at age 6 in “Boyhood.”
- Ellar Coltrane (Mason Jr.) as a pre-collegian in “Boyhood.”
It’s way too early for me to crawl out on this particular limb, but I’m impetuous enough to do it anyway.
The best flicks of any year, the sure-fire Oscar contenders, typically are released in December, often a day or two before year’s end.
That ensures eligibility.
And, usually, a booming box-office.
This year, a vibrant film I just saw breaks with the tradition.
“Boyhood” is Richard Linklater’s cinematic masterwork, a groundbreaking work of scripted fiction that took 12 years to film. It feels real.
Indeed, it’s the most emotionally nourishing movie I’ve seen in eons.
I expect it to cop the Oscar as 2014’s best.
Forget the competition.
For a dozen consecutive years, the director-writer’s cameras filmed the various actors while they grew up, grew furrowed, grew chunkier.
In three or four-day annual shoots.
Ellar Coltrane stars as Mason Junior, a youngster who loses his baby fat and innocence while we watch.
Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter, realistically portrays the boy’s officious cinema sister, Samantha. Olivia (Patricia Arquette) and Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke) come off as his blemished but loving parents.
All four are understated.
The veteran filmmaker overcame his gimmick by making the movie a non-formulaic exploration of human development — without the usual cinematic clichés.
Except for an abusive husband-drunk.
The characters seem transparent, even when internal mini-crises envelop them.
Mostly, though, Linklater, 54, examines the impact ordinariness has on human beings.
His novel-like study — based in Texas, where he was born and yetlives — meanders, but generally focuses on the less showy flashes that can influence life: sibling squabbling, routine schooling, cussing, parental guidance and lapses, Bible- and gun-toting, revolving haircuts and facial hair, juvenile bewilderment and sexuality.
Linklater’s finest scenes exude humor, including gutter bowling and blue fingernails.
But his characters are genuine enough to have been my neighbors in Clearwater, Florida, or Willingboro, New Jersey.
For some viewers, namely those who prefer high drama to watching inch-by-inch life changes, “Boyhood” may seem plot-less. Other moviegoers may suffer from a lack of zitzfleisch, the project’s 165-minute length tough on their bony backsides.
I had no such problems.
Rather, I found the film to be epic — not in the sense of explosions or thousands of warriors and computer-graphic stunts, but epic in the sense of zooming in on people reacting to life’s commonplaceness.
I’ve long been a Linklater fan — especially the documentary “Fast Food Nation,” the fact-based black comedy “Bernie,” and his fictional trilogy, “Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight,” which tracks a loving but contentious couple.
If there’s an antecedent to “Boyhood,” it’s director Michael Apted’s “7-Up,” a documentary series that took 14 seven-year-old British pupils from varied soci-economic backgrounds and revisited them every seven years for the next 49 so far.
The fabricated “Boyhood” has vastly more impact, however.
For me, it creates a time machine.
Although my coming of age didn’t resemble Mason’s in the least, it lets me relive the warmth and angst and crossroads I faced while growing up.
So, thanks, Mr. Visionary, for skipping a cinematic stone over the water’s edge and letting the ripples of my past glisten in the sun. Thanks, too, for reminding me that a parent can be only as joyous as the least happy child.
And thanks for verifying that there’s always a little kid inside an older body.
“Boyhood” will grab no prize for taking more than a decade to complete. Hitler propagandist Leni Riefenstahl started a script in 1934 but didn’t release “Tiefland” until 20 years later. The longevity winner, however, is an animated feature, “The Thief and the Cobbler,” which took 28 years — mainly because writer-director-head animator Richard Williams ran out of money.
No movie this year should be more prize-worthy than “Boyhood,” though.
Linklater has planted the right cinematic seeds to merit his harvesting Academy Awards as best director and best film.
I predict he will.
“Boyhood” is playing at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, the California and Piedmont theaters in the East Bay, and the Embarcadero, Sundance Kabuki Cinema and UA Stonestown Twin in San Francisco.
You can contact Woody Weingarten at voodee@sbcglobal.net.
