Linklater, Richard

RICHARD LINKLATER’S FILMS:  DREAMING ABOUT TIME AND REALITY

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.
2008: Me and Orson Welles.

2011: Bernie.

2013: Before Midnight.

2014: Boyhood.

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 phrase, artistic without being arty.

[The foregoing was written in 2005, in my round-up of the best directors under fifty.  In 2014, Boyhood certainly seemed to confirm my hopes.  Here are selected remarks from this blog, about Linklater's films in the interim.]

Waking Life is a dream of a movie about dreaming, artfully animated from live-action digital video, painterly in kaleidoscopic ways.  In a mind-expanding meditation on “oneironaut” theories espoused by Austin TX savants, the dream-within-dream structure flows and doubles back in intriguing and funny ways. Smart, gorgeous, a compendium of Linklater themes and characters -- what’s not to like?

True to his vegetarian beliefs, Linklater adapted Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser’s muck-raking book about industrial food production, by interweaving anecdotes and wisps of story -- bringing together the putrid realities of meat processing, illegal Mexican immigrants who work the slaughterhouse, and disaffected American teenagers who sling the burgers, along with assorted others either caught up in, or greasing, the food machine. Made fast on a low budget, the film has a certain drabness, dramatically and visually, that is compensated by the cogent points made by a succession of characters in striking cameos from the likes of Ethan Hawke, Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Willis. In the end the human victims stand aside for the bovine, in documentary footage that is as salutary as it is gut-churning. While its stomach may be flopping, this film has its heart and its brain in the right place, making many salient connections amongst the various liabilities of the way we eat here and now. 

Disappointed by Me and Orson Welles, a rare slip from one of my favorites, I wasn’t expecting all that much from Linklater’s latest, but Bernie turns out to be a damn fine film, with a down home feel that makes it very personal.  In his genre-breaking style, Linklater mixes true crime with East Texas small town comedy, just as he mixes actors with real townspeople in a Greek chorus of gossip.  Jack Black is a revelation as a funeral home assistant with a serious people-pleasing demeanor, good at corpse presentation, eulogies and hymns, and comforting widows. He’s the most liked man in town, until he falls in with the most unliked woman, a crotchety rich old widow played by Shirley MacLaine. This film manages to be both funny and thought-provoking without bustin’ a gut over it.

Before Midnight is the latest installment of Richard Linklater’s ongoing masterwork -- the “Before” series, which collectively could be titled à la Proust, “In Search of Lost Time.”  Made in close collaboration with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, as stars and co-writers, the three films to date, made at nine-year intervals, are obsessed with the passage of time, the interpenetration of past and future in the present, all the modes of time travel.  Each deals with one day in the life of a pair, American writer and French social activist, as they reflect on the past and imagine a future, as individuals and as a couple, trying to come to terms in and with the present moment. 

It doesn’t hurt that while each film is inordinately focused on just two people walking and talking, they do so in picturesque places – Vienna, Paris, and the Greek Islands.  And the two characters, whom we have watched age from their 20s to 30s to 40s, are extraordinarily appealing, in all their complexity of confrontation and evasion, showing the slippery side as well as the rough edges of each.  Permanence and mutability, connection and separation, fantasy and disenchantment, all the vicissitudes of a relationship over time are explored with wit and point. 

Though tightly scripted and rehearsed, and intimately intertwined with the characters’ prior incarnations, the endless back-and-forth seems spontaneous, even improvised.  And the three-headed creative process assures an even-handed, fully-rounded treatment of both the boy and the girl, the woman and the man.  We come to know Jesse and Celine as they come to know each other, for better and worse.  They’re funny and sharp, and they each have their reasons, and their unreasons.  There’s no denying that sparks fly, but will the fire burn itself out? 

Linklater contributes a deep sense of cinema history, setting the film in a great tradition, explicitly alluding to Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, but obviously indebted to Eric Rohmer’s delicate tales of erotic negotiation, and Truffaut’s longitudinal study of Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel over five films and twenty years, not to mention Michael Apted’s monumental 7 Up series (now at 56 Up).