This Labor Day I saw the only real must-see movie for educators, or really anyone with a pulse willing to examine their lives. It’s the simple but very complex Richard Linklater film, “Boyhood.”
The film shows how life is a series of milestones, and, when you reach them, they don’t really come on with a fanfare.
They just happen. And then you evolve. You deal with the issues, or not. That normally creates all the drama in movies. But this film isn’t interested in the car crashes of life—the stuff of action films. This one focuses on all the moments leading up to the highs. It zooms in on the little parts, then zooms out just as the “Ka-boom” is about to happen. This film always rolls forward, capturing the flow of life’s overall journey.
At nearly three hours, it’s the underlying current in “Boyhood” that I managed to catch just at the right time.
My daughter is the same age as the actor Ellar Coletrane, the millennial performer who started the project at age 5 and then played the character Mason all through his own adolescence.
By filming with the same actors over 12 years, Linklater allows the actors to age before our eyes, giving it the feel of a documentary. And yet we know it is a controlled piece of art. It’s a fictional telling of life unreeled that leaves a viewer in a mighty confluence rarely reached in a movie theater, one that can only be described as sublime.
Like me, you’ll get all sorts of pangs of recognition.
