2/5
Richard Linklater's decade-long experiment Boyhood is not a very good movie. It feels honest and true, with almost voyeuristic and documentarian authenticity, but those qualities don't make it engaging or compelling. It's a great idea, filming short snippets in real time across years, and I'm amazed that it was accomplished at all given the industry's eagle eye on quarterly profit margins. It could be the future of filmmaking, but I hope that better storytellers can do something more with it. While it tackles some strong emotional threads, including domestic violence, alcoholism, and abandonment, Boyhood feels incomplete and unsatisfying. Even though it recycles a number of themes, it all feels like one big unfinished thought. The only thing more frustrating than a slice-of-life movie without an ending is 12 of them stacked together. Linklater delivers an emotion instead of a story, but perhaps the same people who appreciate Terrence Malick's evocative but empty films will also appreciate Boyhood.
It should have been called Before Adulthood, because it feels very similar to Linklater's previous series of interconnected films where the predominant architecture of the film involves a couple walking around and waxing poetic across the expanse of time. No matter how intriguing the discussion is, the Before series is just a bunch of talking heads. In Boyhood especially you realize that even when things besides conversations happen, Linklater prefers writing to acting, prefers telling to showing. Is there any reason this was a movie instead of a book or a podcast? Did we gain anything at all from having this appear on screen? No. This is not a movie. This is a piece of prose that just so happens to involve cameras and actors.
IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1065073/