Review: Double Linklater with 'Boyhood' and 'Double Play'

Glenn here. Richard Linklater’s Boyhood has been receiving a lot of attention lately. For good reason too, I should say, even if I don’t quite agree that it is the transcendental experience that many others think. (Nor do I think those opinions are invalid, though the rabid if-you-don’t-love-it-you’re-just-wrong brigade started before the film had even premiered outside of festivals). Personally, I had issues with the film's first hour and have wrestled with the quandary of thinking that by making the lead character such an audience cypher it dangles perilously close at times to lacking something (outside of its form, obviously) that is truly unique. Why this boy; why this boyhood? He's almost too saintly, especially when it comes to women and sex, the latter of which the film is shy about. But then I also suspect that not having grown up in America, some of the reverence paid to certain apparent rites of passage didn't quite hit me with the wave of nostalgic emotion that it has others.

In a neat turn of events for fans of Linklater, Boyhood isn't the only chance to spend time with the director in theaters right now

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We Can't Wait #9: Boyhood

[Editor's Note: We Can't Wait is a Team Experience series, in which we highlight our top 14 most anticipated films of 2014. Here's Tim Brayton on Boyhood.]

Boyhood
Richard Linklater’s 12-years-in-production epic follows one child from age 7 to 18, as he and his parents grow up in front of our eyes. There’s no readily apparent plot details beyond that --  unless you're reading spoilers from Sundance reviews -- but I’m hoping for robot vampires.

Talent
Director-producer-conceiver Linklater is joined by his ever-ready partner in long-form narrative, Ethan Hawke, as well as Patricia Arquette. Ellar Coltrane, in the longest-gestating breakthrough performance of all time, stars as the boy himself.

Why We Can’t Wait
The excellence of the every-nine-years entries in the Before… series have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Linklater has a unique gift for telling stories about the way that people’s lives, outlooks, and even personalities mature and evolve as the years go by. And if anything, the hook behind his newly-completed project is even more exciting: watching a child experience all the confusions and difficulties of adolescence in something like real time, the actor living through the same process of maturation as his character. To do justice to that kind of deeply human-scaled content would take a uniquely great director of actors and children, and luckily, in Linklater we have one of the best: his 2003 School of Rock features some of the very finest child acting in recent memory.

Richard LInklater and the cast of Boyhood at Sundance

And if there was any doubt that the one-of-a-kind project was worth paying attention to, the absurdly glowing reviews out of Sundance would seal it. The "dissenting" views from the general chorus of raptures tend to be along the lines of "this unbelievably ambitious and sprawling and exciting project has some rough patches in the plot and a few scenes that don’t land". It would be worthy getting excited for what sounds like the most singular, game-changing film of the year based on the buzz alone, but for those of us who’ve been patiently following along with the film’s production since Before Sunrise was a standalone, the great reviews are merely the capstone to a generation’s worth of anticipation.

But We Do Have To Wait
Well, not everybody – Nathaniel caught it at Sundance. The rest of us will have to wait until confirmed distributor IFC picks a release date; May worked well for Linklater and Hawke’s Before Midnight last year, and rumors are that the same timeframe is likely for this one.

Previously: #10 Big Eyes | #11 The Last 5 Years | #12 Gone Girl | #13 Can a Song Save Your Life |  #14 Veronica Mars | Introduction

Sundance: With "Boyhood", We Can Officially Crown Richard Linklater King of Longform Cinema

Our Sundance Film Festival continues with Nathaniel on Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" 

Life can sneak up on you. Individual moments may linger and shape us but most of life's power is cumulative. It's all in the daily living. When narrative art wants to approach the impossibly grand subjects of Life Itself or at least whole huge swaths of it like Falling in Love or Coming of Age or Starting Over, it's usually in the form of a snapshot: one season, one day, one year, one life-changing event. Richard Linklater's incredible Boyhood, 12 years in the making and longer still gestating before that, starts small. When we first meet Mason Jr (Eller Coltrane) he's a boy of 6 or 7, and not that much different than any little boy... staring at clouds, playing outside, fighting with his sister. But Boyhood has much larger scope and Linklater wanders right out of the singular snapshot and bicycles straight for the mosaic. And what a mosaic! [more...]

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12 Things I Learned Attending The Julie Delpy Q&A At The 92nd St. Y

Hey everyone. Michael Cusumano here. At the risk of spoiling the finale of my best of the year rundown I have only handed out one perfect "10" score for 2013 and that was in the review for Before Midnight. So when I had the opportunity to see star and co-writer Julie Delpy in person as part of the Reel Pieces series at the 92nd St. Y I jumped at the chance. For all you Before Trilogy obsessives, here are a dozen highlight discoveries from the evening: 

1. The first thing I learned is that Delpy’s writing credits on Before Midnight and Sunset are not a courtesy toward an actor who improved around the edges of someone else’s screenplay. One only needs to listen to Delpy speak for a few seconds to realize her piercing intelligence is part of the DNA of the trilogy. The authorial voice is unmistakable.

2. On that score, Delpy noted that while she and Hawke were not credited as co-writers until Before Sunset they were also substantial contributors to Before Sunrise, a script that had numerous scenes left as TBD which were filled in by the actors. Delpy says by the time they started the second film in the series she and Ethan Hawke were experienced enough to know to obtain screenwriting credits.

3. Much like a Mike Leigh production, after extensive workshopping between director and actors the finished scripts on the Before films are tightly scripted, down to the dialogue overlaps.

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Interview: Julie Delpy on the ideal way to watch the "Before" trilogy

Julie Delpy speaking in West Hollywood in NovemberStargazing sometimes leads us to believe that we really know the faces who act out our human dramas onscreen. Or that we know the characters they portray as if they were neighbors. It’s a false intimacy and a fantasy, fiction being fiction and strangers being strangers, but sometimes the illusion is too perfect to deny. Such is the case with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke as Celine and Jessie in the “Before…”  trilogy. The actors cowrote and costarred in the decades spanning trilogy under the guidance of Director Richard Linklater and the films, perfectly spaced out every nine years, have allowed audiences to age along with them, which has only added to their ephemeral mystique. The films are grounded in reality through their short single day stories and long takes - real life happens one day at a time and without a lot of fussy crosscutting – and the only fantastical element is that every day conversations are rarely this thrilling and this wide ranging and this funny simultaneously for 90 minutes straight without some dud moment or mundane distraction breaking the spell. For that kind of perfection you need miraculous writing and great acting.

Julie Delpy is not, of course, Celine. And though I know this as I settle into our conversation over the telephone I’m temporarily stunned when she, unasked, repeats her trilogy’s most famous line when I bring up the ending to Before Sunset (2004, for which she won a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination though not, tragically, the Best Actress nod she deserved as its companion). She sounds just like Celine… only somehow not...

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