Hit Man (Richard Linklater, 2024)

Cast: Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Austin Amelio, Retta, Sanjay Rao, Molly Bernard, Evan Holtzman, Galen Bryant Banks, Mike Markoff, Bryant Carroll. Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Glen Powell, based on an article by Skip Hollandsworth. Cinematography: Shane F. Kellly. Production design: Bruce Curtis. Film editing: Sandra Adair. Music: Graham Reynolds. 

Slacking Off

Movie: Slacker (Richard Linklater, 1990) (Criterion Collection).

Book: D.H. Lawrence, St. Mawr. 

TV: Only Murders in the Building: Who Is Tim Kono?; How Well Do You Know Your Neighbors?; The Sting; Twist (Hulu). 

New Year's Eve in the age of Covid: What better time to stay in and watch stuff that's not too depressing but has a little edge? Slacker fits those criteria as well as any movie. It's a comic portrait of the Austin counterculture of its day, edged with a little violence. I'm a big Richard Linklater fan, and I'm surprised I've never seen his debut film before. It's a walk-and-talker like the Jesse-and-Céline trilogy, and a group portrait like Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some!!, with some of the experimental élan of Boyhood. The tag-you're-it structure -- one character crosses paths with another, launching that person into their own episode -- is beautifully done: Austin becomes something like the Dublin of Ulysses, an inspiration that becomes obvious in the scene in which two guys toss a tent and a typewriter off a bridge as a third reads a passage from Joyce's book. The unknown performers mostly remained unknown, except for Linklater himself, the guy in the opening scene, listed in the credits as "Should Have Stayed at the Bus Station,"  and future director Athina Rachel Tsangari, the "Cousin From Greece" listed in the cast as Rachael Reinhardt. 

Richard Linklater and Rudy Basquez in Slacker (1990)

Only Murders in the Building was also a fortuitous choice for a low-key New Year's Eve. I can't binge-watch much more than the four episodes I saw last night, but the plot is ensnaring and I like wondering which guest star is going to turn up next after Nathan Lane, Sting, and Tina Fey. 

Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunset

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Vernon Dobtcheff, Louise Lemoine Torrès, Rodolphe Pauly, Mariane Plasteig, Diabolo, Denis Evrard, Albert Delpy, Marie Pillet. Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke. Cinematography: Lee Daniel. Production design: Baptiste Glaymann. Film editing: Sandra Adair. 

Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) together again, nine years later. They meet in a Parisian bookstore where Jesse, now a successful novelist, is signing copies of his book, whose story is based on their brief encounter in Vienna nine years earlier. It might have remained that, just a brief encounter with echoes of the great 1945 David Lean film of that name, except that Céline's curiosity tinged with guilt brings her to the book signing, where she hovers on the fringes until she catches Jesse's eye. Like Richard Linklater's 1995 film, Before Sunrise, Jesse's novel ends on an uncertain note: He doesn't say whether the characters he has based on himself and Céline made their appointed rendezvous in Vienna. The people at the book signing urge him to express an opinion on whether they did, but Jesse hedges. And so it remains for Céline herself, who invites him to join her for coffee after the signing, to elicit the truth. She knows she didn't make the planned reunion: Her grandmother, she tells him, died and she was at the funeral when they were supposed to meet. But did he show up? He says no at first, but then confesses the truth: He was there, but with no way for either to contact the other, he only had to assume that she decided it was over. He has married and has a son; she has remained single. And so begins the delicate verbal dance that Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke have scripted for them to perform. They start almost as they did in Before Sunrise: he the brash, open American with the nervous laugh; she the reserved but intrigued Frenchwoman, only faintly condescending to his cultural and linguistic disorientation in a foreign land. And as in the first film, they walk and talk and prod each other into more and more revelations. Like the first film, Before Sunset also has a terminus ad quem that gives their encounter a sense of urgency: He has a plane to catch and a driver to get him to the airport on time. And like the first film, this one ends on an ambiguity: They have gone to her room, where they exchange a bit of dialogue before the credits roll. "Baby, you are gonna miss that plane," she says. "I know," he says. And so we have another sequel to wait for. I know of no other English-language film that so deftly uses dialogue and the chemistry of two actors (who also wrote much of the dialogue) to accomplish its romantic aims while at the same time scoring so many points about the passage of time, the limits of communication, and the significance of sex.  

Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995)

Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Andrea Eckert, Hanno Pöschl, Karl Bruckschwaiger, Tex Rubinowitz, Erni Mangold, Dominik Castell, Haymon Maria Buttinger. Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Kim Krizan. Cinematography: Lee Daniel. Production design: Florian Reichmann. Film editing: Sandra Adair. Music: Fred Frith. 

If there were any justice, Before Sunrise would have transformed the genre of romantic comedy by showing them all how it should be done. Granted, the film neatly transcends the genre, even though it starts with the hoariest of all its formulas: the meet-cute. But by the film's end, we have gotten to know Ethan Hawke's Jesse and Julie Delpy's Céline as we never get to know the characters in the conventional romcom. And then the film does something those conventional ones never do: It stops. There's no rush through the streets by lovers who've decided to reconcile. There are no hilarious exchanges of marriage vows. The movie doesn't tell us if Jesse and Céline ever meet again after he takes his plane to the States and she takes her train to Paris. Granted, the sequels do this, but think how tonic this first film in the trilogy was when it was first released. (And even the sequels don't behave like sequels, but that's another post entirely.) It's hard to undervalue how revelatory Before Sunrise was at the time. For one thing, it established Hawke as one of the best and smartest young actors of his day, taking him out of the "pretty boy" category into which he started to fall after his first big hit, Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, 1989). It also established Richard Linklater as a director of intelligence, with an interest in the effects of time on personality that culminated in his masterpiece, Boyhood (2014). That the film didn't do as much for Delpy's career is probably more evidence that women don't have the same influence in movies as men. (She also revealed later that she wasn't paid as much as Hawke until the third film in the trilogy, Before Midnight, in 2013.) Delpy and Hawke also rewrote a good deal of the screenplay without credit. 

The Newton Boys (Richard Linklater, 1998)

Skeet Ulrich, Dwight Yoakam, and Matthew McConaughey in The Newton Boys

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Skeet Ulrich, Vincent D'Onofrio, Dwight Yoakam, Julianna Margulies, Chloe Webb, Bo Hopkins, David Jensen, Luke Askew. Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Claude Stanush, Clark Walker, based on a book by Claude Stanush. Cinematography: Peter James. Production design: Catherine Hardwicke. Film editing: Sandra Adair. Music: Edward D. Barnes, Bad Livers.

With Richard Linklater directing actors like Matthew McConaughey, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Julianna Margulies, The Newton Boys ought to be a lot better than it is. Not that it's bad, it's just a solid and unmemorable story of the bank-robbing brothers and their accomplices, including nitroglycerin expert Brentwood Glasscock (Dwight Yoakam), who plagued Texas and much of the central United States in the 1920s. The shadow of Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) hangs long and heavy over this movie. A coda to the film shows the real, elderly Willis Newton, who was played by McConaughey, being interviewed by Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. It may be more interesting than what precedes it, though it helps illuminate how well McConaughey caught the character.

Everybody Wants Some!! (Richard Linklater, 2016)

Watching Richard Linklater's Everybody Wants Some!! a day or two after Yasujiro Ozu's Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth? reminded me that one of the essential characteristics of a great director is a compassionate interest in human beings. It's not that they are both comedies about college students: They are also both "coming-of-age" films, although Linklater lets us extrapolate the course of his characters' potential maturity (or lack of it), while Ozu lets his characters mature before our eyes. Ozu and Linklater have been called "sociological" filmmakers because their movies tend to be about what happens to their characters in a given cultural context: in the case of Linklater's film a group of young jocks at a Texas college in 1980; in Ozu's, Japanese college students in the early years of the Great Depression. Linklater has acknowledged that Everybody Wants Some!! is a kind of coda to Dazed and Confused (1993), the action of which takes place four years earlier on the last day of high school. The newer film is more narrowly focused than the earlier one, which had a sampling of all types of high schoolers, male and female, from brains to jocks, from bullies to victims. Everybody is centered on a group of horny young men, highly competitive college baseball players, all of whom have dreams of making it as pros. But it's still an ensemble work, with a gallery of good young actors, mostly familiar from TV: Blake Jenner from Glee, Tyler Hoechlin from Teen Wolf, Ryan Guzman from Pretty Little Liars, among others. Linklater forces us to see through the jock stereotypes and find the brains and hearts intentionally hidden behind the bravado and braggadocio of hormones and muscles. He's interested primarily in his characters' intense competitiveness and in their swiftly fading innocence. As in Dazed and Confused, in which the older stoner Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey) exhibited the Peter Pan syndrome, unwilling to leave adolescence behind, in Everybody we meet Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), a 30-year-old who masquerades as a transfer student from San Luis Obispo, trying to prolong the blissful innocence of a life spent smoking dope and playing ball. The adult world rarely intrudes on the film's characters: The coach's prohibition of alcohol and women in the residence houses is quickly ignored. But Linklater neither preaches responsibility nor sentimentalizes immaturity. In the last scene, the freshmen Jake (Jenner) and Plummer (Temple Baker) finally get to their first college class after a weekend of partying and promptly put their heads down to sleep through the history professor's lecture. They're young and have no history, or as Willoughby puts it, they're there "for a good time, not for a long time." As good as it is, Everybody "underperformed" at the box office, perhaps because it looks too much like a routine teen sex comedy for discerning audiences and didn't have enough gross-out humor or marketable stars for the usual audience for that genre.

Dazed and Confused (Richard Linklater, 1993)

Rory Cochrane and Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused

In Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater does -- albeit on a smaller scale -- something like what Francis Ford Coppola did for the gangster film in The Godfather (1972) or Sam Peckinpah did for the Western in The Wild Bunch (1969): They took a familiar movie genre, in Linklater's case the teen comedy, and perfected it. Linklater doesn't parody it the way Tina Fey did in Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004) or sentimentalize it the way George Lucas did in American Graffiti (1973), though the latter film, with its oldies soundtrack, comes closer to what Linklater accomplishes. But Linklater explicitly rejected the nostalgia of American Graffiti. His attitude is summed up by the character Randall "Pink" Floyd (Jason London), the quarterback who resists signing a no alcohol, no drugs pledge so he can stay on the team: "If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself." Linklater has said that he wanted to avoid the melodramatic excesses of teen films -- the car crashes and pregnancies -- and to reflect the reality of just "riding around and trying to look for something to do with the music cranked up." Roger Ebert and others have called Linklater an anthropologist. It's easy to see this in his best work, such as the 12-years-in-the-making Boyhood (2014) and the Céline-and-Jesse trilogy, Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013), in which Linklater takes the time to get to know his characters and the way their experiences have shaped them at specific moments in their lives. But in Dazed and Confused we are offered only a few hours with a host of characters, on the last day of school in 1976 -- the summer that Linklater turned 16 -- and into the evening that follows. There is beer and pot and vandalism -- which gets the vandals shot at -- and some rather frustrated sexuality, but it never turns into anything worse than the seniors hazing the freshmen by paddling them, and the most sadistic of the seniors getting a bucket of paint dumped on his head in retribution. There is no plot as such, but who needs plot when you have a cast of formidable but then-unknown young actors, including two future Oscar winners, to create the characters? Ben Affleck evokes the sadism of O'Bannion, whose obsession with paddling freshmen begins to frighten even his fellow hazers. Matthew McConaughey's Wooderson, the twentysomething slacker who still hangs out with high school kids, is the very embodiment of the Peter Pan complex. He insists "You just gotta keep livin', man," but reveals the unacknowledged sadness within by saying, "That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age." Linklater's genius is demonstrated in his ability to tell so much about so many in his huge cast of characters, from the completely baked Slater (Rory Cochrane) to the class nerds (Marissa Ribisi, Anthony Rapp, and Adam Goldberg), in such a short time.

Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)

Academy voters had essentially two choices for best picture of 2014, not that there weren't six other nominees, two of them, The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson) and Whiplash (Damien Chazelle), quite worthy of the honor. But Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu) and Boyhood were the front-runners, in large part because they took great risks. In addition to an often surreal approach to its subject matter, Birdman was filmed to give the illusion that most of it was one continuous take -- even though the narrative was not necessarily continuous. And Boyhood was filmed over the course of 12 years, as its protagonist, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), went from the age of 6 to 18 years old. Faced with two such groundbreaking but inimitable films, the Academy chose poorly: It went for the flashy technique of Birdman instead of the profoundly revealing story of the pressures a child faces in the process of growing up. But it's not just Mason's story, it's also that of his mother (Patricia Arquette), his sister (Lorelei Linklater), and his father (Ethan Hawke). Arquette deservedly won a supporting actress Oscar, but Hawke (who was nominated) also demonstrated the remarkable ability to adapt his persona over the extended filming time. The divorced parents face pressures, too: the mother the more immediate one of becoming a single parent and then making disastrously wrong choices as she remarries, the father the long-term one of remaining a presence in the lives of his children. He seems to have it easier than his ex-wife does, but every time Hawke re-appears in the film, he beautifully communicates the sense of having lost something precious. Like his son, he grows, shedding his fecklessness and irresponsibility, just as Mason learns to sift through the continuous barrage of advice from adults and find the wisdom to become his own person. I don't know of any film that so tenderly presents what the quotidian is like, without resorting to melodramatic crisis at its turning points. The only other films I can even compare it to are François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Satyajit Ray's Aparajito (1956), which take place in much harsher milieus than the Texas towns and cities in which Linklater sets Boyhood. But even though that world is milder and more familiar than the places in France and India where Truffaut and Ray set their films, Boyhood reveals how the world shapes us -- or as Linklater puts it at the end of his film, "the moment seizes us" -- as well as those films do. I think it's a treasure that belongs in their august company.

Bernie (Richard Linklater, 2011)

Imagine Bernie without Jack Black, but with, say, Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role. Hoffman would have played the hell out of the part, which is one of the reasons he is so sorely missed, but the tone of the film would have been very different. What Black brings to the role is a very familiar image, that of a scamp, a mocking presence in almost all of his previous movies. But here he's cast against type, as a sweet-natured possibly gay man who manages to capture the hearts of a small East Texas town, and more particularly the shriveled heart and deep needs of a wealthy widow (Shirley MacLaine). It's the tension between the manic imp of his earlier films and the good-hearted (if naively lethal) Bernie that gives this movie its acerbic tone. I had forgotten that Richard Linklater also directed School of Rock (2003), Black's first big hit in a starring role after stealing High Fidelity (Stephen Frears, 2000) out from under the nose of John Cusack. It's to Linklater's credit that he sees more in the actors he works with than others do. Small town East Texas is an easy target for satire, and I understand the critics who liken Bernie to Fargo (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 1996), which did similar things with the easily caricatured accents and mannerisms of the deep plains states. Having grown up in the South and lived in Dallas, on the fringe of East Texas, I have known a few Bernies: somewhat effeminate men who don't fit the good-ol'-boy stereotype of the region, but are tolerated by the good-ol'-boys and especially doted upon by their wives and mothers. Black captures the Bernies to perfection, perhaps because Texan Linklater and his co-scriptwriter Skip Hollandsworth, who wrote about Bernie Tiede first for Texas Monthly, know them well, and know how (as the Coens likewise did in Fargo) to transcend the merely satiric for something more humane and interesting.