The slacker mirror sees what it wants to see.
When that mirror is called “Boyhood,” it sees the makings of a masterpiece in the plot-free tale of a winsome pre-verbal child of 6 growing up in real time on camera into a winsome, slightly more verbal collegian who kind of likes photography, magic mushrooms and “the moment.”
Other mirrors might not see this masterpiece. Other mirrors might see something more akin to a one-trick pony. It’s a pretty neat trick, to film a boy’s life intermittently over 12 consecutive years using the same actors to play the boy and his parents and sister. But is it the wrong pony? If Richard Linklater wins an Oscar in a couple of weeks for directing “Boyhood,” should someone wrest it away and hand it to Michael Apted?
Movie critics have been nearly unanimous in their praise of “Boyhood.” And it is the longitudinal aspect that they marvel at — the sheer “stamina,” as Anthony Lane put it in The New Yorker; its revelation that movies “can make time visible,” as David Edelstein wrote in New York magazine. (It’s hard to imagine that critics would have deployed such superlatives had the actors simply been aged by the application of makeup or other cinematic artifices in the service of the same threadbare story.)

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