Screen: IFC Productions / Detour

I watched Boyhood a couple of weeks ago, and I’ve been trying to find a way into my write-up ever since.

The problem is that the few notes I took concern themselves almost entirely with negatives, things that didn’t work for me or clanky bits, when overall I loved Boyhood the way you love a person, in spite of the flaws and also because of them, the crooked humming and off-key broken noses that make a beloved yours and real. It’s so watchable, so compelling, even when it departs somewhat from the eponymous boy (Ellar Coltrane) and wanders over to his mom (Patricia Arquette) or her drain-circling marriage to Bill (Marco Perella); it’s the closest thing to a true hybrid of fiction and documentary that I’ve seen, because the way Richard Linklater built it, in bursts and bits over a dozen years, lets you see life and lives lived in the actors’ faces as time passes.

But as often happens in Linklater joints, there’s the occasional spasm of C-plussy acting or middle-of-the-fairway telling instead of showing, and putting up the occasional traditional first-act/second-act etc. tentpole isn’t Linklater’s strength. I watched his late-’90s bank-robbery pic The Newton Boys over the weekend, and in Roger Ebert’s review, he observes, “The film chronicles their career in a low-key, meandering way; we’re hanging out with them more than we’re being told a story.” This isn’t a complaint on Ebert’s part as far as I can tell, and I’d certainly consider it an endorsement on mine, because Linklater’s great gift is immersing us in a time or a feeling or a group of people: Mason and Samantha and their shifting family; the last day of school in the mid-seventies; a train robbery from a time when getting shot in the face (twice!) wouldn’t necessarily kill you. To Linklater, the inciting incident is…you, showing up with a box of Sourpatch Kids to watch the day(s) in the life he’s put together.

By that same token, when Linklater seems to lose confidence in that…informal formalism? the cinema of texture? Whatever we want to call it, he from time to time looks down, sees the valley floor far below, and throws in a shot of Mason looking at his mother’s love interest of the time and frowning verrrry pointedly; or inserts an awkward and not very credible dinner at which Bill’s drunken raging finally breaks the camel’s back (prior to that, the portrayal of Bill’s bloaty slide into a bottle of Popov had a perfectly light touch). Even the last scene felt oddly stiff, not just because Mason is tripping with a bunch of other frosh he’s never met before. It feels like Linklater is trying a little too hard to go out on a profundity, and when Arquette has just had that pleading speech about where the time goes, and thinking there’d be more than this, maybe easing up on the deeper-meanings throttle is the way to go in the final sequence.

Understand, though: this is a great film. It’s a triumph of unfilmic film things like planning, somehow not over-planning, and having a good ear for people (nobody better understands what Ethan Hawke can do than Linklater). It’s a bold experiment in time-lapse storytelling. Most of all, it’s what Linklater does and has always done so well: telling a story by hanging out.

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