Boyhood

Mason is a boy that everyone knows. Not him personally, but we all know someone in our class who is Mason. Divorced parents, hateful of the trends around him, and a little bit of an outcast. Because his character was so familiar to me, it also made him very relatable. You can't mention Boyhood without mentioning the fact that it was a twelve year project. Watching  the same actors grow over time with their characters gave the film a very realistic feel, almost like a documentary. When I was actually watching Ellar Coltrane, the man playing Mason, grow up it felt like growing up with a childhood friend. The movie ends with Mason being around the same age as me and his ending outlook on life is one that I can understand. He's about to start a new portion of his life and is embracing the idea of living in the moment.
The thing that made this twelve year project work was its seamless editing. The movie never lost it's flow and wove through the lives of the family in a way that made sense. Some stories aren't concluded but that's what makes the movie even more real. Sometimes you just go on without knowing what happens to your old best friend when you graduate or your old step-siblings when your mom pulls you out of the house. I liked the idea that the audience was kind of like a relative of Mason, just dropping in every few years and getting snippets of his life.
The editing was very nonchalant but that sometimes made it hard to reestablish your bearings in the new time. When you begin jumping years ahead, and especially when Mason begins puberty, it could be confusing to understand what year it was and where these people were in their lives. Although the writers did a good job of beginning the new scenes with dialogue that clued you in on what point in their lives we were at. There's one scene where Samantha is talking about having fun senior year and five minutes later, Mason is talking about visiting Samantha in her dorms. It's from this context that the viewer can understand that we're a few years after the scene previous.
This form of editing over a span of years can be seen in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. That film was another example of a story moving through several years and relying on other context clues in the film to describe the setting.