Boyhood

Let me start by saying I don't watch many movies, and I don't often get around to the reviews - so I'm not sure whether this has been said or not, but Boyhood, for me, was as close to a novel as I've seen in a modern film. And I thought the movie, by the way, was fabulous: ambitious, regretful, enlivening - things all great films (and novels) should be. 

It was an amazing experience watching Boyhood - largely because, as I say, I felt like I was reading a book. The movie's a character study, it's true, but it's a study of character evolution as well. The boy - played by Ellar Coltrane - grows over time, over circumstances and situations. It's as if he's a character in a novel, meeting and interacting with secondary characters along the way. (Again, just like a novel.)

Boyhood is a series of scenes, and in each, Coltrane matures, learns. We watch him on the screen; we sense his parents' sorrow; we come to know him as a three-dimensional character with strengths and flaws, ambitions and frustrations. He emerges as the sum of his experiences, both positive and negative.

I had the sense from friends that Boyhood lacked a plot, that it wasn't leading toward anything. I had the opposite sense: each scene was a story in itself, and the product of those stories was a novel charting a boy's growth over twelve years. To provide that sort of cinematic vision to audiences is a rare gift, indeed. It's a gift that literature provides, too.