I finally caught up to the 165-minute drama Boyhood a couple of days before the Academy Awards, and even after seeing the well-intentioned but rather dull film I still thought it would win Best Picture because of the obstacles overcome in making it over a 12-year period.  Boyhood succeeds as an experiment more than a chronicle of adolescence — and it is a fascinating experiment.

Filming in Texas a few days each year for more than a decade, writer-director Richard Linklater has fashioned a narrative of a family growing up, growing apart, and growing together with a modern sensibility that reflects common connections and disconnections that people are really experiencing.  The verisimilitude of the project is overwhelming, and must have been incredibly challenging.  Just completing such a film deserves high praise.  Whether the result is as rewarding as it is intended to be is up to each viewer.

I love the premise, but not so much the result.  Linklater is great at capturing the small, seemingly insignificant moments of life — but a collection of those moments is not especially dramatic.  Particularly when the main character, Mason (Ellar Coltrane) seems so diffident and confused about his own existence.  I liked him better as an impressionable youth; he seems like a pretty normal kid early on.  As he matures, however, Mason seems unnecessarily alienated and troubled.  Perhaps this alienation is Linklater’s dramatic point — that modern youth is floundering without direction and purpose — but I grew tired of Mason’s immaturity.

Furthermore, although the picture’s title is Boyhood, the scope of Linklater’s vision encompasses the entire family, including Mason’s sister Samantha (Lorelai Linklater, daughter of the director).  Boyhood it may be, but the film clearly deals with other hoods as well — sisterhood, parenthood, step-parenthood, etc. — which removes the focus from Mason at key moments.  Linklater also stages some of the most dramatic moments offscreen, and the movie misses the energy which conflict, and humor, and sentimentality, and absurdity, can provide.

In short, the film is better in theory than it is in execution.  Patricia Arquette is solid as the single mother raising Mason — winning an Oscar for her performance — yet her character arc is more unbelievable than Mason’s adolescent adventures.  I liked Ethan Hawke as the father too restless to settle down — until he does just that — but even his performance is “actorly.”  My favorite character is Mason’s sister Samantha, but she gets the short end of the script.  I wish the script encompassed a bit more plot and action as well as character, because after a couple of hours with this family, and almost another hour to go, I was hoping for Bruce Willis to come charging in with something for them to do.  It is a movie, after all.  ☆ ☆ 1/2.  24 February 2015.