1990: Slacker.
1993: Dazed and Confused.
1995: Before Sunrise.
1998: The Newton Boys.
2001: Waking Life.
2001: Tape.
2003: School of Rock.
2004: Before Sunset.
2005: Bad News Bears.
2006: A Scanner Darkly.
Rick Linklater is a fellow who likes to follow his own path, whether it leads him to the margins or into the mainstream. He’s hard to pin down. Various sources give his birthday as 1960 or ’61 or ’62, though all agree on Houston as his birthplace. He went to college in East Texas on a baseball scholarship, but dropped out to work on an oil rig for several years, to save up money and then move to Austin, where he started a film society and taught himself the technical aspects of filmmaking.
Though eschewing school, Linklater thrived in the intellectual ferment of the university town, and made it the subject of his first feature film, Slacker, a plotless succession of relentless talkers, dreamers, and nuts. The peripatetic philosophizing establishes one of the constants of his work, a celebration of idleness and ideation, clearing a space and a time to talk and to dream.
Nonetheless Linklater is no theorist, but a playful realist, focused on what he calls the “politics of everyday life.” His characters tend to talk big, but to live in the little details of their lives. His mission and method is simple: “What’s underrepresented in film is the real essence of life, the in-between space that gets glossed over.”
So he tends to be boldly speculative at the same time he is devoted to the earthy specificities of real life, which enables him to negotiate the divide between independent and commercial cinema, the handmade and the popularly accessible. Dazed and Confused has emerged as a classic teen stoner flick, but its real merit is in the precise depiction of the last day of high school in a Texas town in the summer of ’76, the swirl of characters that anatomize the sociology of a given community at a given moment.
Though Linklater’s first mid-budget studio film, The Newton Boys, a genial reversal of Bonnie and Clyde, flopped, he clicked with the joyous School of Rock, and is back in theaters right now with a remake of Bad News Bears. Between his flop and his hit, he went back to basics and made two films originating on digital video that couldn’t have been more different. Tape is a three-character, one-room, real-time psychological chamber piece, while Waking Life is a sprawling, phantasmagoric exploration of dreaming, dazzlingly animated from a live-action original. (He returns to that technique in the forthcoming Philip K. Dick adaptation, A Scanner Darkly.)
Linklater’s masterpiece so far, his incomparable paean to the intimate joy of talking, worthy of an Eric Rohmer, is the pair of films, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Both center around days in the life of two characters, embodied by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, first when they meet on a train in Vienna, and nine years later when they meet again in Paris. We can hardly wait till the next decade for future installments in a series likely to rival Francois Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series.
As far as I’m concerned, Rick Linklater is the shining hope of American cinema today -- intellectual yet accessible, intimate yet socially conscious, personal yet popular, serious yet funny – in a phase, artistic without being arty.
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