Ellar Coltrane gives Boyhood a watchfulness that keeps Mason’s childhood from feeling too neatly explained. We rate the performance highly, while recognising how much it owes to Richard Linklater’s patience and Sandra Adair’s editing.
Fi1m perspective
In Boyhood (2014), Ellar Coltrane watches the adults around Mason without always letting us know what he thinks of them. Richard Linklater gives him room to keep something to himself, even when he is the person we have come to see. We can watch the child without being told exactly what to make of him.
The unusual shape of his career begins with a role that occupied much of his childhood. Linklater cast him at six, and filming continued intermittently from 2002 to 2013. Coltrane also had a small part in Linklater’s Fast Food Nation (2006) during that span. It is difficult to assess Boyhood as an ordinary early performance when the actor is changing physically alongside the character, and those changes account for so much of its effect.
Adair’s editing matters as much to our response as Coltrane’s reserve. She lets years pass without turning each episode into an explanation of what Mason has learnt. We found his changing face unexpectedly painful, because recognising him after another jump in time also meant knowing that we would not see that younger child again. Linklater gets that feeling from ordinary ageing, without needing a catastrophe to make us care.
Coltrane contributed ideas and material from his own life to Mason, which is worth remembering before treating the performance as simply a record of growing up. He is not always the most compelling person on screen beside Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke. A more forceful performance might hold our attention more reliably, but it would also make Mason easier to read than he needs to be.
The later supporting parts in Barry (2016) and The Circle (2017), followed by a recurring television role in The Good Lord Bird (2020), have not displaced Boyhood as the centre of his reputation. We have less reason to make large claims for the rest of his work than to value what he and Linklater achieved together. Start with Boyhood, and give its quieter stretches time.
Biography
Ellar Coltrane is an American actor, born Ellar Coltrane Kinney Salmon on 27 August 1994 in Austin, Texas. He is best known for portraying Mason Evans Jr. in Richard Linklater's Boyhood (2014), a role filmed intermittently over twelve years from 2002 to 2013.
Coltrane began acting as a child, appearing in Lone Star State of Mind (2002) and Fast Food Nation (2006). Subsequent credits include Barry (2016), The Circle (2017) and The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot (2018). He was primarily homeschooled and received a GED.
