After watching Boyhood, I wondered whether the movie's aesthetic value depended on the way it was made. Would I have a different, less enthusiastic, feeling about the movie had Linklater made it in the typical manner, using different childhood actors to depict the characters at different ages and makeup to increase the ages of the adult characters? Is our engagement during the movie facilitated by knowing that it is the same actors filmed over a 12-year period, a unique and incredibly demanding feat of moviemaking? Also, what would my experience have been if I had not known in advance how the movie was made? I suspect that viewers who did not know in advance would at some point during the movie realize that the same actors are portrayed and actually age in real time. In this case, prior knowledge (or not having knowledge) can completely change one's experience with an artwork.
We expect certain things when we experience art than when we experience reality. Boyhood is a fascinating work that merges the two. Interestingly, when I was watching the movie, the blending of art and reality made me wary of what was going to happen to the boy. Reality has its ups and downs yet it is rarely the case that during childhood one experiences life-threatening, dramatic events. In Hollywood movies, however, such events—murder, suicide, illness, danger, violence, mental disease—occur all the time and are often a movie's primary plot point. Our expectations of what we see in a movie and what we see in real life are clearly not the same. In this sense, Boyhood is also unusual as it depicts a slice of life, more real than fiction.