Wildcat (Ethan Hawke, 2023)

Cast: Maya Hawke, Laura Linney, Philip Ettinger, Rafael Casal, David Towne, Cooper Hoffman, Steve Zahn, Nik Pajic, Willa Fitzgerald, Alessandro Nivola, Liam Neeson. Screenplay: Shelby Gaines, Ethan Hawke, based on stories by Flannery O'Connor. Cinematography: Steve Cosens. Production design: Sarah Young. Film editing: Barry Poltermann. Music: Latham Gaines, Shelby Gaines.

I wish there were more movies like Wildcat. Not that it's particularly good: Except for the acting, not much about it in conception and execution works very well. But it's made from the heart by someone with the status and income to see that it got made in an era when money (or lack of it) usually trumps love. It was born from Ethan Hawke's love for the stories of Flannery O'Connor, and maybe from the love for his daughter, Maya, who gives a fine performance as not only O'Connor but also some of the characters from her stories. It's this intermingling of O'Connor's life and fiction that proves to be the undoing of Wildcat, a brave idea undone by some bad ideas, like having Maya play a male character, Julian, in a section drawn from the story "Everything That Rises Must Converge." An unbilled cameo by Liam Neeson as a priest also stands out as a too-showy moment. But bravo to the Hawkes for a worthy effort. 

Blaze (Ethan Hawke, 2018)

Ben Dickey and Alia Shawkat in Blaze

Cast: Ben Dickey, Alia Shawkat, Charlie Sexton, Josh Hamilton, Lloyd Teddy Johnson Jr., Wyatt Russell, Jenn Lyon, Ritchie Montgomery, David Kallaway, Jonathan Marc Sherman, Jean Carlot, Alynda Segarra, Kris Kristofferson, Richard Linklater, Steve Zahn, Sam Rockwell, Martin Bats Bradford. Screenplay: Ethan Hawke, Sybil Rosen, based on a book by Rosen. Cinematography: Steve Cosens. Production design: Thomas Hayek. Film editing: Jason Gourson.  

You probably have to be deeper into outlaw country music than I am to fully appreciate Blaze. It's a familiar story: a promising musician whose life comes undone because of substance abuse and failure to manage their career wisely. This one is informed by the woman in the musician's life: The film is based on the memoir of Blaze Foley's sometime companion, Sybil Rosen, who co-wrote the screenplay with the director, Ethan Hawke. It's a solid biopic that stars an unknown actor, Ben Dickey, in the title role, with Alia Shawkat as Sybil. Foley was the kind of intensely personal songwriter whose music lends itself to a biopic -- almost shapes it, in fact -- and Hawke takes full advantage of it by presenting most of Foley's songs in performance scenes that blend into dramatic sequences. Dickey and Shawkat get good support from Charlie Sexton as Townes Van Zandt. There are also some cameo performances, including Kris Kristofferson in his final screen appearance as Foley's father, and an amusing turn by director Richard Linklater and actors Steve Zahn and Sam Rockwell as some oil millionaires who decide to get into the record business -- not really to Foley's benefit. Blaze is slowly paced and the narrative sometimes gets oblique, and the 129 minute run time betrays the slackness that often afflicts independent film, but on the whole it's a success and another landmark in Hawke's increasingly impressive career. 

Raymond & Ray (Rodrigo García, 2022)

 

Raymond & Ray (Rodrigo García, 2022)

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Ethan Hawke, Maribel Verdú, Sophie Okenedo, Todd Louiso, Oscar Nuñez, Vondie Curtis-Hall, Maxim Swinton, Chris Silcox, Chris Grabner, Tom Bower. Screenplay: Rodrigo García. Cinematography: Igor Jadue-Lillo. Production design: David Crank. Film editing: Michael Ruscio. Music: Jeff Beal. 

Ethan Hawke seems to be everywhere these days: playing John Brown on the TV series The Good Lord Bird (2020) and King Aurvandil in The Northman (Robert Eggers, 2022), hiding behind a mask as the Grabber in The Black Phone (Scott Derrickson, 2022), making the double lives of Oscar Isaac’s Marc Spector difficult as Arthur Harrow in Moon Knight (2022), and narrating and directing the well-received documentary series The Last Movie Stars (2022), about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Not that I’m complaining: Hawke has become one of our finest actors, able to more than hold his own in the company of a wizardly performer like Isaac, and it’s good to see his energy hasn’t flagged in the least. It’s worth going back to watch some of his earlier films to see how he has grown as a performer, deepening his voice and gaining confidence. In Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997), for example, there is still something callow and lightweight about him in comparison with his co-star Jude Law. I think he makes Ray a more credible character than Ewan McGregor, no slouch as an actor, does of the half-brother Raymond. The problem with Raymond & Ray is that it’s not a movie that gives either actor much to play. It’s a trifle, a would-be black comedy that isn’t black enough or funny enough, depending mainly on the improbable discoveries that the mismatched half-brothers make as they uncover the secrets of their late father’s life. Hawke and McGregor get good support from Maribel Verdú as the father’s landlady/lover and Sophie Okenedo as the nurse who tended him as he lay dying, women privy to some of the surprise truths about his life. And the movie makes some nice hits at the insincerity behind the pieties of the funeral business. But Raymond & Ray is the kind of throwaway feature that used to be made when there was a demand to fill theater seats. The equivalent today is the film that gets a perfunctory theatrical release before swiftly heading to a streaming service, which is exactly what happened to this amusing but forgettable movie.

The Black Phone (Scott Derrickson, 2022)

 

Cast: Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Ethan Hawke, Jeremy Davies, E. Roger Mitchell, Troy Rudeseal, James Ransone, Miguel Cazarez Mora. Screenplay: Scott Derrickson, C. Robert Cargill, based on a story by Joe Hill. Cinematography: Brett Jutkiewicz. Production design: Patti Podesta. Film editing: Frédéric Thoraval. Music: Mark Korven.

Horror movies usually don’t scare me: I know their tricks and tells, and as an amateur film scholar I’m as absorbed in the techniques of camerawork and editing as I’m involved with the story. So The Black Phone, which blends two horror movie tropes, the serial killer and the ghost story, never made me jump out of my seat or threatened to come back at me in my dreams. Still, it’s a good one, with some involving performances, especially by the young actors Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw but also by the invaluable Ethan Hawke, even hidden behind some scary masks. It’s as much a story about the dark side of childhood – Finney (Thames) and Gwen (McGraw) are abused by their father, played by the usually creepy Jeremy Davies, and Finney is being bullied by some of classmates – as it is about predators and ghosts. But Scott Derrickson handles both sides of the story with finesse and without too many horror movie clichés.

Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunset

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Vernon Dobtcheff, Louise Lemoine Torrès, Rodolphe Pauly, Mariane Plasteig, Diabolo, Denis Evrard, Albert Delpy, Marie Pillet. Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke. Cinematography: Lee Daniel. Production design: Baptiste Glaymann. Film editing: Sandra Adair. 

Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) together again, nine years later. They meet in a Parisian bookstore where Jesse, now a successful novelist, is signing copies of his book, whose story is based on their brief encounter in Vienna nine years earlier. It might have remained that, just a brief encounter with echoes of the great 1945 David Lean film of that name, except that Céline's curiosity tinged with guilt brings her to the book signing, where she hovers on the fringes until she catches Jesse's eye. Like Richard Linklater's 1995 film, Before Sunrise, Jesse's novel ends on an uncertain note: He doesn't say whether the characters he has based on himself and Céline made their appointed rendezvous in Vienna. The people at the book signing urge him to express an opinion on whether they did, but Jesse hedges. And so it remains for Céline herself, who invites him to join her for coffee after the signing, to elicit the truth. She knows she didn't make the planned reunion: Her grandmother, she tells him, died and she was at the funeral when they were supposed to meet. But did he show up? He says no at first, but then confesses the truth: He was there, but with no way for either to contact the other, he only had to assume that she decided it was over. He has married and has a son; she has remained single. And so begins the delicate verbal dance that Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke have scripted for them to perform. They start almost as they did in Before Sunrise: he the brash, open American with the nervous laugh; she the reserved but intrigued Frenchwoman, only faintly condescending to his cultural and linguistic disorientation in a foreign land. And as in the first film, they walk and talk and prod each other into more and more revelations. Like the first film, Before Sunset also has a terminus ad quem that gives their encounter a sense of urgency: He has a plane to catch and a driver to get him to the airport on time. And like the first film, this one ends on an ambiguity: They have gone to her room, where they exchange a bit of dialogue before the credits roll. "Baby, you are gonna miss that plane," she says. "I know," he says. And so we have another sequel to wait for. I know of no other English-language film that so deftly uses dialogue and the chemistry of two actors (who also wrote much of the dialogue) to accomplish its romantic aims while at the same time scoring so many points about the passage of time, the limits of communication, and the significance of sex.  

Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995)

Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Andrea Eckert, Hanno Pöschl, Karl Bruckschwaiger, Tex Rubinowitz, Erni Mangold, Dominik Castell, Haymon Maria Buttinger. Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Kim Krizan. Cinematography: Lee Daniel. Production design: Florian Reichmann. Film editing: Sandra Adair. Music: Fred Frith. 

If there were any justice, Before Sunrise would have transformed the genre of romantic comedy by showing them all how it should be done. Granted, the film neatly transcends the genre, even though it starts with the hoariest of all its formulas: the meet-cute. But by the film's end, we have gotten to know Ethan Hawke's Jesse and Julie Delpy's Céline as we never get to know the characters in the conventional romcom. And then the film does something those conventional ones never do: It stops. There's no rush through the streets by lovers who've decided to reconcile. There are no hilarious exchanges of marriage vows. The movie doesn't tell us if Jesse and Céline ever meet again after he takes his plane to the States and she takes her train to Paris. Granted, the sequels do this, but think how tonic this first film in the trilogy was when it was first released. (And even the sequels don't behave like sequels, but that's another post entirely.) It's hard to undervalue how revelatory Before Sunrise was at the time. For one thing, it established Hawke as one of the best and smartest young actors of his day, taking him out of the "pretty boy" category into which he started to fall after his first big hit, Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, 1989). It also established Richard Linklater as a director of intelligence, with an interest in the effects of time on personality that culminated in his masterpiece, Boyhood (2014). That the film didn't do as much for Delpy's career is probably more evidence that women don't have the same influence in movies as men. (She also revealed later that she wasn't paid as much as Hawke until the third film in the trilogy, Before Midnight, in 2013.) Delpy and Hawke also rewrote a good deal of the screenplay without credit. 

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sidney Lumet, 2007)

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, Albert Finney, Aleksa Palladino, Michael Shannon, Amy Ryan, Brían F. O'Byrne, Rosemary Harris. Screenplay: Kelly Masterson. Cinematography: Ron Fortunato. Production design: Christopher Nowak. Film editing: Tom Swartwout. Music: Carter Burwell.

This unrelentingly bleak family/crime drama was Sidney Lumet's last film as a director, and I can only say that he went out at the top of his form. That it was also one of the last films of Albert Finney and also starred another actor gone before his time, Philip Seymour Hoffman, only adds to its melancholy weight. Hoffman is at his best as Andy Hanson, the financially overextended older son, who tries to drag his brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) into a scheme to rob their parents' suburban mall jewelry store. Andy persuades Hank that it would be a victimless crime: They'd collect the loot and their parents would collect the insurance. Everything goes wrong with this scheme that you might imagine. It's complicated, for example, by the fact that Hank is sleeping with Andy's wife, Gina (Marisa Tomei). Hawke is superb in the role of Hank, a weak, spoiled younger brother now gone to seed -- a part that fits the actor perfectly as he ages out of the boyish good looks that once made some critics dismiss him as a lightweight. And midway through the film, when things have gone so wrong that the men's mother, Nanette (Rosemary Harris), lies comatose from the shooting that took place during the botched robbery, we meet Charles, their father, played by the always reliable Finney. The brothers are already in trouble because the wife and brother of the man Hank hired to do the job, who was killed in the heist, want hush money. Things get even worse when their father, urged implacably on by grief and anger, begins investigating what brought about his wife's death. Kelly Masterson's screenplay doesn't give Tomei enough to do in the story, but every moment when she's on screen is memorable, particularly the scene in which she leaves Andy. Lumet stages this in their apartment with a long take that holds Andy in the background as Gina struggles to haul her suitcase to the door, all the while delivering the news that she's been sleeping with his brother. Andy doesn't react immediately to this bit of information, but even later when he meets with Hank again, Hoffman lets us see how it's seething inside him. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is not an easy film to watch; it's perhaps a little too grim and sordid for its own good. But at its best it's the kind of morality tale you might find in medieval literature, in the darker moments of Chaucer and Boccaccio, and it has some of the burden of greed and hubris that afflicts the families of Greek tragedy, even to the point of reversing the story of Oedipus in its stunning outcome.

Reality Bites (Ben Stiller, 1994)

Reality Bites (Ben Stiller, 1994)

Cast: Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Janeane Garofolo, Steve Zahn, Ben Stiller, Swoosie Kurtz, Joe Don Baker, John Mahoney, Harry O'Reilly, Susan Norfleet. Screenplay: Helen Childress. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Sharon Seymour. Film editing: Lisa Zeno Churgin, John Spence.

Every generation seems to have a film that speaks to its disaffection with the older generation, which is accused of incomprehension of the needs of the young for self-fulfillment and identity. For my own generation it was Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955). For the Baby Boomers it was The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967). In Reality Bites, Ben Stiller seems to have set out to make the definitive film for Generation X, who find themselves underemployed after having expected, as Winona Ryder's Lelaina Pierce puts it, "to be somebody by the time I was 23." Instead, they're bitten by reality: held back by people like Lelaina's boss, a Houston morning-show host played with the grin and dead eyes of a shark by John Mahoney, or with their real lives neatly packaged (in "reality bites") for the MTV generation, as her documentary footage is by the producers of the company for which Ben Stiller's Michael Grates works. Some give up and go along, as Vickie (Janeane Garofolo) does when she accepts a job as manager of an outlet of The Gap, attending jeans-folding seminars. Others, like Ethan Hawke's Troy Dyer, accept their slackerhood: "I sit back and I smoke my Camel Straights and I ride my own melt." I think it's revealing that the meet-cute of Lelaina and Michael is brought about by a cigarette she throws into his convertible, causing their cars to collide. The amount of cigarette smoking in Reality Bites is an excessiveness we will probably not see again, but then this is a generation marked by AIDS and the threat of early death, so there's a kind of fatalism that pervades the lives of these characters. Reality Bites is not, I think, quite as distinguished a film as either Rebel Without a Cause or The Graduate. It spends too much time on the Troy-Lelaina-Michael triangle, with its predictable and rather sappy resolution, and not enough on Vickie and the closeted Sammy (Steve Zahn), whose stories -- her HIV test, his coming out -- are given perfunctory treatment. But there are enough bright lines and good performances to make it a movie worth revisiting.

The Newton Boys (Richard Linklater, 1998)

Skeet Ulrich, Dwight Yoakam, and Matthew McConaughey in The Newton Boys

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Skeet Ulrich, Vincent D'Onofrio, Dwight Yoakam, Julianna Margulies, Chloe Webb, Bo Hopkins, David Jensen, Luke Askew. Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Claude Stanush, Clark Walker, based on a book by Claude Stanush. Cinematography: Peter James. Production design: Catherine Hardwicke. Film editing: Sandra Adair. Music: Edward D. Barnes, Bad Livers.

With Richard Linklater directing actors like Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Julianna Margulies, The Newton Boys ought to be a lot better than it is. Not that it's bad, it's just a solid and unmemorable story of the bank-robbing brothers and their accomplices, including nitroglycerin expert Brentwood Glasscock (Dwight Yoakam), who plagued Texas and much of the central United States in the 1920s. The shadow of Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) hangs long and heavy over this movie. A coda to the film shows the real, elderly Willis Newton, who was played by McConaughey, being interviewed by Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. It may be more interesting than what precedes it, though it helps illuminate how well McConaughey caught the character.

First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017)

Ethan Hawke in First Reformed

Toller: Ethan Hawke
Mary: Amanda Seyfried
Jeffers: Cedric the Entertainer
Esther: Victoria Hill
Michael: Philip Ettinger
Balq: Michael Gaston

Director: Paul Schrader
Screenplay: Paul Schrader
Cinematography: Alexander Dynan
Production design: Grace Yun
Film editing: Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.
Music: Brian Williams

"Derivative" is a much-overused word in film criticism: Everything comes from something else, and even the film praised as "original" is eventually going to reveal its sources. So it's not a knock on Paul Schrader's First Reformed that it feels so strongly influenced by the directors Schrader wrote about in his book Transcendental Style in Film: Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Theodor Dreyer. What directors haven't been influenced by them, or at least had to acknowledge that the intensity and commitment of their work suffers in comparison? The resemblance to Ozu's work is purely stylistic in First Reformed: a spareness and stillness of image, sometimes even a sense of claustrophobia in Schrader's determined use of the so-called "Academy ratio," the 1:37:1 frame familiar to us from movies made before widescreen technique became common to moviemaking. A more direct borrowing comes from Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951) whose title character has intestinal torments that are reflected in those of Schrader's upstate New York priest, Toller. And the spectrum of religious faith, from non-belief to obsession, exhibited by Schrader's characters is found among the characters of Dreyer's Ordet (1955). But the film that seems to have most directly influenced Schrader is Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1963), whose ailing, doubt-ridden pastor finds himself unable to prevent a troubled member of his congregation from committing suicide. There are times when Schrader's cinematographer, Alexander Dynan, even seems to be copying the setups of Bergman's, Sven Nykvist: Both, for example, give us views of the preachers facing out upon chilly, nearly empty sanctuaries, backed up by the emblems of the faith they barely cling to. If anything, Schrader's film is a kind of updated version of Winter Light; in First Reformed the existential dread of the times is no longer annihilation by nuclear warfare but instead the uncertainly looming cataclysm of climate change. Schrader of course goes beyond mere time-shifting: Ethan Hawke's Toller is not just a latter-day version of Gunnar Björnstrand's Tomas Ericsson, but a contemporary man with contemporary problems like dealing with the clammy hold that corporate capitalism has on his church, in the form of Michael Gaston's Balq and the toadying Jeffers, the preacher for a "prosperity Gospel"-style megachurch, surprisingly played by Cedric the Entertainer. And Toller finds ways to console the widow of the man who commits suicide that might have shocked Ericsson. This is the point at which derivativeness becomes a virtue in Schrader's film, when we can superimpose Bergman's vision of faith onto our own, more than half a century later. There are moments when Schrader's film seems to miss the mark and slip over into mere thriller-movie melodrama, particularly the introduction of ecoterrorism in the form of a suicide vest, so that we miss the maturity with which filmmakers like Bergman and Bresson and Dreyer resolved their characters' spiritual crises. But Hawke, in a performance that is more assured and sensitive than any I've seen him give, holds the film together admirably. 

Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997)

Ethan Hawke and Gore Vidal in Gattaca

Vincent Freeman: Ethan Hawke
Irene Cassini: Uma Thurman
Jerome Morrow: Jude Law
Director Josef: Gore Vidal
Detective Hugo: Alan Arkin
Anton Freeman: Loren Dean
Dr. Lamar: Xander Berkeley
German: Tony Shalhoub
Caesar: Ernest Borgnine
Marie Freeman: Jayne Brook
Antonio Freeman: Elias Koteas

Director: Andrew Niccol
Screenplay: Andrew Niccol
Cinematography: Slawomir Idziak
Production design: Jan Roelfs
Film editing: Lisa Zeno Churgin
Music: Michael Nyman

It's refreshing these days to see a science fiction movie not dependent on special effects to make its point, which is why the 21-year-old Gattaca feels retro, even dated in so many ways. The focus remains on ideas about genetic manipulation as its protagonist, Vincent, tries to elude detection as an "in-valid" -- one who was conceived in the messy old random way rather than the "valid" one of pre-screened fertilization that produced his brother, Anton. Vincent wants to go to space, and by working with a shady organization that provides in-valids with the identities of certified valids, he gets his chance, taking on the identity of Jerome Morrow, an athlete who was so depressed at coming in second that he walked in front of a moving car and is crippled for life. The film strains a bit to persuade us that people will accept Vincent's new identity, since Ethan Hawke's Vincent doesn't look a lot like Jude Law's Jerome, except in an ID photo that tries to strike some kind of plausible middle between the two. And later in the film we'll be forced to believe that Vincent and his brother, Anton, don't immediately recognize each other as the grownup versions of the siblings who used to compete with each other in swimming races. But suspension of disbelief aside, Gattaca manages to be a fairly witty and intelligent film. I particularly like the scene in which Vincent/Jerome and the other astronauts board the spaceship to Titan, wearing business suits, not the usual Mylar spacesuits we associate with space travel. It reminds me a bit of the men who board the rocket ship in Georges Méliès's A Trip to the Moon (1902), wearing top hats.

Maggie's Plan (Rebecca Miller, 2015)

Travis Fimmel and Greta Gerwig in Maggie's Plan

Maggie: Greta Gerwig
John: Ethan Hawke
Georgette: Julianne Moore
Tony: Bill Hader
Felicia: Maya Rudolph
Guy: Travis Fimmel

Director: Rebecca Miller
Screenplay: Rebecca Miller
Based on a story by Karen Rinaldi
Cinematography: Sam Levy
Production design: Alexandra Schaller
Film editing: Sabine Hoffman
Music: Michael Rohatyn

Director-screenwriter Rebecca Miller keeps the comedy in Maggie's Plan in check, so that scenes that might have been hilarious wind up amusing, and scenes that might have been amusing take on an edge of melancholy. In the end, the film feels a bit overburdened by the necessity of working out the titular plan: a career woman who, in midlife crisis, decides to have a child with a sperm donor. That's the contemporary equivalent of the kind of formulaic dilemma that used to spin the plots of Doris Day's movies. As Maggie is going through her plan to inseminate herself with sperm donated by the agreeable, if somewhat oddball Guy, she manages to fall for a married man, John, who is at odds with his wife, Georgette. This leads to a comic scene that I don't think I've ever encountered in another film: Having just inseminated herself, Maggie hears the doorbell and crabwalks her way to answer it, only to have a rather messy accident when she stands up. It's John, of course, there to proclaim his love for her and to sleep with her. We jump ahead three years: John and Maggie are married and have a little girl. But as their marriage goes sour, and we realize that John and Georgette were really meant for each other after all, another plan is introduced: Georgette and Maggie plot to undo what has been done. Greta Gerwig, Ethan Hawke, and Julianne Moore are marvelous performers, of course. But there's something off about Miller's touch, so that the humor is lost in the mechanisms of the plot. The ending kicker, however, in which Maggie realizes that Guy, and not John, is the actual father of the child, is nicely done.

Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)

Academy voters had essentially two choices for best picture of 2014, not that there weren't six other nominees, two of them, The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson) and Whiplash (Damien Chazelle), quite worthy of the honor. But Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu) and Boyhood were the front-runners, in large part because they took great risks. In addition to an often surreal approach to its subject matter, Birdman was filmed to give the illusion that most of it was one continuous take -- even though the narrative was not necessarily continuous. And Boyhood was filmed over the course of 12 years, as its protagonist, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), went from the age of 6 to 18 years old. Faced with two such groundbreaking but inimitable films, the Academy chose poorly: It went for the flashy technique of Birdman instead of the profoundly revealing story of the pressures a child faces in the process of growing up. But it's not just Mason's story, it's also that of his mother (Patricia Arquette), his sister (Lorelei Linklater), and his father (Ethan Hawke). Arquette deservedly won a supporting actress Oscar, but Hawke (who was nominated) also demonstrated the remarkable ability to adapt his persona over the extended filming time. The divorced parents face pressures, too: the mother the more immediate one of becoming a single parent and then making disastrously wrong choices as she remarries, the father the long-term one of remaining a presence in the lives of his children. He seems to have it easier than his ex-wife does, but every time Hawke re-appears in the film, he beautifully communicates the sense of having lost something precious. Like his son, he grows, shedding his fecklessness and irresponsibility, just as Mason learns to sift through the continuous barrage of advice from adults and find the wisdom to become his own person. I don't know of any film that so tenderly presents what the quotidian is like, without resorting to melodramatic crisis at its turning points. The only other films I can even compare it to are François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Satyajit Ray's Aparajito (1956), which take place in much harsher milieus than the Texas towns and cities in which Linklater sets Boyhood. But even though that world is milder and more familiar than the places in France and India where Truffaut and Ray set their films, Boyhood reveals how the world shapes us -- or as Linklater puts it at the end of his film, "the moment seizes us" -- as well as those films do. I think it's a treasure that belongs in their august company.