Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Movies

Linklater scores at Sundance with ‘Boyhood’

Richard Linklater’s three-hour “Boyhood,” which was the last film added to the Sundance slate this year and made it too late to be included in the catalog, was one of the most anticipated films of the fest given its director’s track record and the film’s irresistible hook: Linklater filmed his actors (including his daughter Lorelei and the film’s star Ellar Coltrane) at intervals over a 12-year period so we can actually witness the performers and their characters growing up before our eyes.

Linklater is at mid-career, but even so, this is a capstone that earns him the title of the Truffaut of Texas. Combining the nutty youthful looseness of “Dazed and Confused” and “Slacker” with the time-sprawl of the “Before” trilogy (of which I am not particularly a fan), “Boyhood” perhaps most closely resembles a condensed version of Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series, which revisited the same character as played by the same actor in four feature films made over 20 years. (Here I’ll pause to note that another prominent Texan director, Wes Anderson, is also heavily influenced by French New Wave filmmakers such as Truffaut, and the mix of Lone Star State bluntness with airy Parisian soul-searching is a serendipitous one.).

Coltrane, who is riveting throughout, first appears as Mason, an adorable blond boy aged about six who lives with his frazzled mom (Patricia Arquette, who gives a performance of great sensitivity, range and depth) and his older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) while his rakish dad (Ethan Hawke) appears only intermittently, with unspecified disagreements between the two parents.

Without any chapter headings to announce jumps in time, Linklater follows this family throughout Mason’s boyhood as his mom definitively splits up with his dad, marries an academic who turns alcoholic and abusive, gets an advanced degree and a career teaching psychology and finally contemplates life alone as her children prepare to leave for college. A scene in which the mom, seated alone at a table while Mason packs a box and heads out the door, is a sad and funny summation of the whole three-hour experience and, by extension, of life itself. “I just thought there would be more,” she says. Didn’t we all? Now that her kids are gone, the next major family event, she supposes, is “my funeral.” “Aren’t you jumping ahead like 40 years?” asks Mason, and he’s right, too.

Ellar Coltrane stars in “Boyhood.”Richard Linklater

Allowing both sides a fair say is a sign of a generous and mature writer, but Linklater designs many hilarious moments too, such as a scene straight out of “Dazed” in which boys mock each other with anti-gay slurs and brag about their sexual conquests while “camping out” in a half-finished house drinking pathetic cans of beer. And Hawke is funnier than he usually is as the irrepressible and semi-self-defeating dad with a liberal political streak (in an especially engaging scene he enlists his kids to put up Obama yard signs and tasks one of them to steal a John McCain sign — all of this being as quixotic as anything in “Slacker” given that we’re in the red state of Texas). The dad is eventually forced to trade his muscle car for a minivan and marries a devout Christian whose parents are the type of people who give 15-year-old Mason a shotgun and a Bible for his birthday.

As was evident in “Bernie,” another of his best films, Linklater is a proud Texan who nevertheless has an outsider’s eye for its quirks, and Wes Anderson might do well to return to his native state for inspiration and to consider how his fellow Houstonian puts warmth and humanity above technique and design. Few films about ordinary life contain as much richness, goodwill, compassion, wit and understanding as “Boyhood.” Its only handicaps are an unstructured quality that some may resist and its length, which seems either too long (164 minutes is a long sit for an essentially plotless movie) or too short (given that IFC bankrolled the project, it’s easy to picture “Boyhood” as, say, a six-part miniseries). But if it goes out to theaters just as it is, I’m confident the film will meet with adoring audiences of cinephiles who don’t require a three-act formula to be exhilarated.