For me, what I found entrancing is the beautifully observed and quietly complex social reality of the specific scenes of daily life that cumulatively gain depth and impact as the characters change over time, as they fill out, mature and show the effects of time and gravity too, both physical and emotional. Patricia Arquette who wants to improve herself makes an upwardly-mobile relationship with the off putting psychology prof who turns out an overbearing drunk, rife with menace, beating her up in a shattering scene, set against the movie's general quiet, and then all the kids' huddled reaction and then him standing in front of them with such a latent promise of bullying violence about them and you can feel their terrified fear of him lashing out.
So much of the movie's focus is on the resilience of kids, their moves and self protections when their world can turn dangerous on a dime say at the dinner table or when they're swept up in the consequences of their parents' big choices. The small, intimate detailed touches are fantastic: scared of the prof's explosive rage, Mason hides in a bedroom and obsessively watches a comedy video; Lorelei’s version of Britney Oops! … I Did It Again; the trek to buy copies of a Harry Potter book. I could go on forever.
So beautifully and quietly and subtly observed, so much of the feeling of lives lived.
There is a comparison to Catcher In The Rye, I'd make: Holden wants Phoebe and her friends never to leave the field of rye they're playing in, never to lose their innocence because the world is so full of crap, as Holden might say, only the innocence of childhood redeems it. In Boyhood, we see them leave the field, meet life as it meets them, crap and non crap in all that, as it all meets so many of us in our own late twentieth century and early 21st century moment, and shows us their adaptations, their beginning to mature, leaving them on the precipice of adulthood. By my lights, clearly not everyone's, it's simply an amazing and beautiful movie.
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