‘Beautiful portrait of growing up’ coming Thame Cinema

THE FILM: Boyhood – WHEN? Saturday, January 10, 2015 – Details:  USA 2014, 166 minutes, 15 Certificate – Directed by Richard Linklater, Starring Ellar Coltrane, Ethan Hawke, Rosanna Arquette, Lorelei Linklater.

YOU know those movies that span decades of a character’s lifetime, with different actors at different stages of life? Or the ones in which the kids grow up but the adults seem to stay exactly the same, perhaps with a few streaks of grey? Richard Linklater’s answer to such cinematic challenges – his response to the quest for ultimate naturalism and authenticity – was to film the same people every year, for twelve years.

Starting with the then six year-old Ellar Coltrane, and filming every summer until he turned 18, this film documents a boy called Mason from primary school until his first day in college. The result is an utterly unique, thrilling, superbly intelligent and beautiful portrait of growing up – the family holidays, the difficulties at school, the day-to-day banalities, the girls, the getting drunk, the usual stuff. Mason’s parents are divorced: Rosanna Arquette is his hard working mother with a tendency to hook up with the wrong guys; regular Linklater collaborator Ethan Hawke is the charming but feckless dad.

The film is also a portrait of parenting, of the uncertain steps and their unknown consequences, of the difficulties and the rewards, the essential unknowables of a child’s inner life. And it also brings home the fact that it all goes so quickly, that what feels like an eternity as a child seems to vanish in an instant from the perspective of the parent.

Hard to describe as anything other than a masterpiece, and on every list of the best films of 2014 if not the decade, Boyhood is not to be missed. View the trailer here.