Best Picture Contender
I can imagine this winning the Academy Award for Best Picture in a few days. Richard Linklater, the director of awesome teen films like Dazed and Confused and thoughtful films like A Scanner Darkly decided to experiment with shooting a coming of age film over a span of 12 years with all the original actors. The result, was a film called Boyhood which in actuality isn't just about the progression of a boy's life, but also the adult lives of his parents and his older sister who is played Linklater's actual daughter.
If you can get passed the nostalgia of seeing things like Gameboy SP, and accept it for what it is, you can find yourself becoming really engrossed in the film. The draw of the film was the nostaglia though as the main character, Mason, grows up in a similar time period where I grew up as a child. The fashion, music, hairstyles, and technology trends were so different and it's interesting to see that progression as time goes on. What I found most interesting was the change of Ethan Hawke's character who plays Mason's biological father. He goes from being a bachelor with a badass muscle car and no real girlfriends -- sharing custody with Mason's biological mother played by Patrica Arquette to a man driving a mini van and wearing button-up shirts who is married to a God-fearing Sarah Palin type conservative. It's funny because that is contrasted with how he was just a few years prior as a man who was putting up posters of Obama-Biden and swore off Bush.
Then the final scene of him with his son where he says to him if his mother would have just been patient for the man he became it would have been different. The story is not one just about a boy growing in to manhood -- the film doesn't distinguish manhood starting at a certain point in one's life, but that things like maturity can take some time and for men can take well in to their adulthood.
For the mother, I found her story to the be the hardest to grasp because it's something we've all thought about and/or feared. Getting to certain goals in your life accomplishing them only to still feel empty. With her son and daughter leaving the nest, she doesn't know what her life will become anymore because she doesn't know who to be or how to be without being a mother -- which took over a large part of her life. She made their milestones, her milestones and now that she set out what she wanted to do, have family, get her masters degree, and the job she wanted, she's at a lost of how to go on and that's really painful to watch. A lot of times parents will forget to experience things for themselves and have that happiness so they look for it in their children or in their relationships -- in her case her several failed relationships didn't fulfill her and it makes her story all the more tragic because in the end the biological father probably would have ended up being a better match for her in the long-run as all she wanted was for him to be more responsible and more mature which he turned out being.
Anyway good film. Not sure about the ending, but it makes sense that it leaves of a bit anti-climatic. It's essentially life. Things happen and you lose girlfriends, but you end up meeting new people and it's all better again . This is probably one of my favorite films this year.
What are your favorite films from this year?
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