Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is an experimental film whose experiment seems at once audacious and so obvious you can’t believe you haven’t seen it tried before. To tell the story of a contemporary Texas childhood, Linklater shot his movie across twelve years, using the same actors throughout and letting his characters actually grow up on camera — the children sprouting and maturing, the parents graying and thickening, time’s arrow flashing by.
There are echoes here of Michael Apted’s famous “Up” documentary series, with its English subjects pinned down every seven years as they moved from childhood into middle age, and of course of Linklater’s own trilogy, Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight, with its three snapshots of a love story at once-a-decade intervals. But his new film’s precise blend of fictional content with a documentary’s ruthless realism is something new, and the finished product is remarkable in its enveloping plausibility, its cumulative weight.
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