Obviously Boyhood is a tour-de-force of time travel through a young man's life and it deserves the plaudits it's garnered. My one gripe is not just with this one film but with many other American films and TV series and that is their concentration on suburbia as the ideal milieu for the American Family, a family that is almost always white, and a blondish white at that. The interiors of their houses are generically tasteful and bland as if furnished by real estate brokers who have a tendency to refer to interiors as "sets". The ideal family invariably consists of a harried Dad, a wise mother, and bratty children who repeatedly entertain the audience with their disrespectful and profane repartee. Plots consist of how outside disruptive forces ( aliens; zombies; drugs) threaten this sanctified social fabric. One understands the young American directors making films these days were nourished on TV sit-coms like Leave it to Beaver and The Brady Bunch but one still wishes they would look outside the bubble more often. All that said, it must acknowledged that many of these movies ( TV series these days are extended films) are brilliant despite their somewhat generic sub-texts of idealized middle-class life. Breaking Bad and Mad Men come to mind. And joining their ranks is Boyhood which gently moves through decades as if they are hours instead of years. Writing, direction and acting are all superb and Patricia Arquette deserves an Oscar for her performance. Despite the convincing script, and the bravura performance of a director who spent years making this film, the coming-of-age experiences are somewhat predictable, especially the ending. One wonders how the vast audience who don't share the values of a suburban middle-class life react when seeing Boyhood. Will the boats heading for America become even more overloaded or will it cause the embracing of a less materialistic dream?
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