Boyhood

The filmography of writer/director Richard Linklater has begun to feel less like a typical body of work and more like a lifelong art project. For more than 20 years-in "Dazed and Confused," the "Before Sunrise" trilogy, "Everybody Wants Some!!," and others, the Austin, TX-based filmmaker has placed versions of himself into comedies and dramas that are clearly sourced from memories. The central characters in these films are played by different actors, but their appearance usually remains the same: moppy-haired, athletically built, wearing an inquisitive expression. Typically they track a contained moment in time; a weekend, a day, or even just an hour and change. And this is part of what sets "Boyhood" apart from the rest. They only aim to document a moment. "Boyhood" sets out to document an era.

"Boyhood," which is now being re-released on Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection, was first released theatrically in 2014, soon after the completion of its production. But the hook, as you may already know, is that it stretches back much further. Production lasted for twelve years, with the same actors playing the same roles in short segments shot in stretches of two or three weeks, with one segment shot every year. The boy of the title is the Linklater stand-in, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), and we see him from age six to his high school graduation, running errands with his single Mom (Patricia Arquette), or going on trips during visits with his Dad (Ethan Hawke), or getting into arguments with his sister (Lorelei Linklater, the filmmaker's daughter, adding another personal element to the film's family-time-capsule angle.)

It's the way the film presents those capsules that grant it such a singular emotional power. There's nothing gimmicky or even mannered about the way the movie shifts from one year to the next. No match cuts are used to illustrate the aging faces of the actors explicitly, no subtitles or text is used to specify what year we're in. So the years seem to blur with one another, passing by without delineation. You're forced to process time through the physical changes in the actors, the developing technologies they use, the evolving discussions they have, the music they listen to, or even by the political signage they drive by, all of which seems to develop and change at any moment's notice. Rather than representing this passage of time through the framework of traditional drama, "Boyhood" relies on the very sight of growth itself.

Appropriately, time is the subject of the Criterion Collection's Blu-ray release, just as it is the subject of the film itself. The 2-disc set includes an entire disc full of "Boyhood" history, and you might detect a theme among the titles of the extras: "Twelve Years" is a 50-minute documentary that includes production footage from each year of the shoot, and cast/crew interviews about the impact of the schedule on the artistic process; "Memories of the Present" is a interview/conversation recorded in Austin with Arquette, Coltrane, Linklater, and producer John Pierson; "Always Now" is a conversation recorded in New York with Coltrane and Hawke; "Time of your Life" is a visual essay by critic Michael Koresky, narrated by Coltrane; and finally "Through the Years," a series of photographs taken by Matt Lankes during production, which play out under narration read by many of the aforementioned names.

Rounding out the release is an audio commentary on the first disc, which features no less than ten different cast and crew members; Linklater, three actors, one producer, the casting director, the production designer, the editor, the costume designer, and the first assistant director. The most common subject of discussion is the way that the on-again-off-again shooting schedule influenced and altered both the working methods of the creative team, as well as the script and film itself. But what makes "Boyhood" so unlike other movie is not the way the crew utilized or reacted to time. Instead, it's the way they sculpted it. Linklater and his team manage the herculean task of documenting and aestheticizing the way that human development seems to occur with a subtlety that eludes our very own eyes. His other comparably autobiographical movies succeeded in signifying specific units of time. What "Boyhood" accurately represents is something different, more slippery, and perhaps even more profound. It captures the way that time slips away.

"Boyhood"
Blu-ray (2 Discs)
Criterion.com
$39.95