Linklater 101
When Richard Linklater’s Slacker was released in 1991, there was barely any apparatus in place for independent film, much less a formless slice of life about fringe-dwellers, crackpots, dreamers, and self-made philosophers in Austin, Texas. With an ironic title that hit the sweet spot for conceptions (and misconceptions) about Generation X, the film confirmed, post-Sex, Lies, And Videotape, that an audience existed for low-budget American fare. But it also changed people’s conception of what a movie could be, asking them to coast along on an amiable roundelay without the need for dramatic stakes. Starting with Linklater’s own delightful existential ramble to an airport cab driver en route to downtown, Slacker follows the musings—some absurd, some profound—of a JFK conspiracy-theorist, an anti-government paranoiac, and, in its funniest and most famous scene, a young woman hawking Madonna’s pap smear on the street. (“It gets closer to the rock god herself than just a poster.”) If there’s a common thread uniting this daisy chain of vignettes, it’s an overall sense of profound disconnection, a refusal by young people to participate in a system that will bring them no joy and wither their souls. To outsiders, that refusal looks like laziness—the slackerdom of the title—but it’s the type of political statement that some of Linklater’s subsequent films deliver with more obvious conviction. The eclecticism that defines his career comes through in the glorious final sequence, when the film breaks down and follows local kids who just pick up the camera and have fun experimenting with it. More than 20 years later, Linklater remains in Austin doing just that.
After Slacker became a minor indie phenomenon, the upstart distributor Gramercy Pictures gave Linklater the resources to make 1993’s Dazed And Confused, a bittersweet nostalgia piece about the last day (and night) of school in 1976 small-town Texas, but it couldn’t find an audience for it. When viewers did finally catch up with Dazed And Confused on video—and about half a billion different psychedelic-themed DVD special editions—it became a stoner classic, the ideal background noise for parties and joint-passing sessions. And there’s a good reason for that: The soundtrack is a K-Tel bonanza of hits from the likes of Alice Cooper, ZZ Top, and Foghat; the script is loaded with quotable one-liners, many coming from future stars of tomorrow; and the loose-limbed narrative, only slightly more taxing than Slacker’s, allows for a casual drifting of attention, leading to nothing more consequential than a quarterback asserting his right to hang with his burnout friends and score Aerosmith tickets in the morning. But Dazed And Confused isn’t all good vibes: While Linklater remembers the time fondly and in immersive, hilarious detail, the film is about the often-painful rites of passage adolescents have to endure, from the hazing rituals of the upperclassmen to a scene where the class brain subjects himself to a pummeling rather than resign himself to being “an ineffectual nothing.” Where similar films like American Graffiti attached importance to the end of a night as the end of an era for its characters (hello, Vietnam War), Linklater ends with a cached keg and a lot of vivid memories—many of them sweet, a few that left a mark, and all graced with the benefit of perspective.
Continuing the dusk-’til-dawn rumination of Dazed And Confused, Linklater’s affecting 1995 romance Before Sunrise has the feel of an Eric Rohmer movie, using a lovely and at times magical Vienna backdrop to frame an ongoing conversation between two people. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet on a train: He’s an American traveling from Budapest to Vienna to catch a flight back home to Texas; she’s a Parisian returning home after visiting her grandmother. The two start talking and flirting on the train, Hawke convinces Delpy to spend the day with him, and off they go into the night. The two have great chemistry together, exciting and challenging each other with various theories and ideals, and they embrace the possibilities of their situation as perhaps only impetuous young people can. Watching Before Sunrise means witnessing two people fall in love in almost real time, aided by a city that welcomes their spontaneity with atmosphere and enchanting little detours. To some degree, the two characters are pretentious, and some of their ideas don’t hold up to much scrutiny, but their youthful idealism and unguarded romanticism give Before Sunrise tremendous power, too. They know the carriage will turn back into a pumpkin at the end of the night, but they invest themselves wholeheartedly, leading to an ending so deliciously ambiguous that it sounded like a crime for Linklater and his stars to reunite 10 years later—that is, until Before Sunset turned out to be even better.
A decade after Slacker, Linklater returned to its freewheeling inventory of philosophical musings and comic digressions, but he found a different, more expansive form for it. Collaborating with rotoscoping maestro Bob Sabiston, Linklater shot scenes for 2001’s Waking Life on digital video and handed it over to Sabiston and his team of animators to trace and color the actors and backdrop in a low-fi process that yielded unstable yet malleable and often strikingly beautiful images. The effect lures viewers into a dreamlike state, making them more receptive to the half-profound/half-whimsical ideas that stretch and tear at the fabric of reality. The topics of discussion are as lofty as lucid dreaming and the film theory of André Bazin, and as discursive as Timothy “Speed” Levitch’s verbal tours. And the film’s Linklater surrogate, a dream-within-a-dreamer played by Wiley Wiggins, epitomizes the director’s primary attribute: curiosity. Linklater’s career has always been more receptive than declarative, and with Waking Life, more than anything in his career, he works to convince viewers to open up their minds and take the journey with him. In this case, it’s a pleasure to oblige.
Intermediate
After launching his career with multiple movies set in confined locations and timeframes, Linklater made his first stab at a “big” movie with The Newton Boys, a period picture starring Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Skeet Ulrich, and Vincent D’Onofrio as mostly amiable Depression-era bank robbers. Linklater didn’t try to reinvent the Stetsons-and-Tommy-guns genre, and that ultimately may have been The Newton Boys’ undoing, both at the box office (where business was modest) and with the critics (whose reviews were largely mixed). At the time, it felt like Linklater was moving in the opposite direction from the ’70s auteurs: He’d made his offbeat, personal films first, and then his formulaic Roger Corman-style action picture. But viewed away from the context of 1998—when the film seemed like a disappointment to many Linklater fans—The Newton Boys is highly enjoyable, with charismatic performances across the board and real old-timey flavor. And it’s not that out of step with Linklater’s more acclaimed work. Linklater has said he was drawn to this story because it’s a piece of Texas history, and while he doesn’t skimp on the explosions, chases, and gunplay, he’s just as enthused about the scenes where his boys sit around jawing after a job. Had The Newton Boys leaned more on the latter than the former, it might’ve gotten better reviews; had it reversed that formula, it might’ve been a hit. Regardless, there’s a sense of decency to the characters and a level of detail to the setting that make The Newton Boys a fine way to pass two hours.