Animal House: EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!

Everybody Wants Some!! traps you in the company of a Texas college baseball team on the weekend before classes start for the fall 1980 semester and demands you be charmed by their antics. Luckily, this isn’t some cheap campus comedy with rowdy frat boys bonding while raucously drinking and smugly humping their way through anonymous crowds of young ladies. Or, rather, it’s not only that. It’s written and directed by Richard Linklater, who has become a reliable chronicler of a very particular slice of America – adrift youngsters (Boyhood, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise), minimum wage workers (Fast Food Nation), underemployed daydream philosophizers (Slacker, Waking Life), aspiring artists (Me and Orson Welles), and oddball misfits (School of Rock, Bernie). Now he takes his shaggy low-key anthropological approach to a collegiate party atmosphere. It proves that if you put together a dumb bro-y college comedy with wit and intelligence it’s a lot more defensible than the usual lowbrow fare the subgenre encourages.

It begins with a freshman pitcher (Blake Jenner) showing up for move-in day at the team houses, ramshackle domiciles off campus donated to the athletic department to help alleviate overcrowding in the dorms. This leaves a baseball teams’ worth of guys bunking together, generating a locker-room competitive energy that never dissipates. He quickly discovers most interactions he has with his new friends will either be part of a game, an inside joke, or a hazing ritual. They’re always “on.” Linklater, never the most plot-based filmmaker around, is content to follow the fresh-faced young man through his weekend, acclimating to the surroundings while getting his bearings with a new group of boisterous guys who he’ll be rooming and playing ball with. We see parties, clubs, bars, and dorms where they’ll hunt for ladies to impress, and hopefully talk into following them back to the house where they’re willing to break coach’s rules against fraternizing upstairs behind closed doors.

Rather than engage with any serious drawbacks to such a lifestyle – in this film hazing is nothing you can’t shrug off, drinking isn’t a problem, and all the women are consenting – Linklater simply soaks the proceedings in a warm bath of nostalgia, through bright and clear simple images and wall-to-wall period music. Here’s an idealized throwback college lifestyle, where partying is consequence free and real life responsibilities only drift in from the sidelines with a distant looming that doesn’t feel too terribly relevant in the moment. That’s for later. College here is in a suspended animation before classes start, before any schedule and any work. It’s freedom to make your own fun as a crucible in which to discover who you really are. We follow the guys to a disco, a country bar, a punk show, a party for theater kids. They change their clothes to fit each occasion, and adapt their teasing patter to the context. Why not try on new aspects of identities? They’re still young.

Linklater brings his usual eye for environs -- it's a convincing 1980 college town atmosphere -- and social types, empathetically cataloguing a variety of guys in the group. There’s a confident competitor (Tyler Hoechlin), a chatterbox smart aleck (Glen Powell), a nice guy (J. Quinton Johnson), a clueless dope (Tanner Kalina), a dazed lunk (Temple Baker), an intense weirdo (Juston Street). In some ways they blur together, a sea of young, (mostly) white, athletic jocks. But there are clear differences among them as well, including the likes of a funny stoner philosophizer (Wyatt Russell) and a sweetly naïve country boy (Will Brittain). The movie’s about their homosocial bonding through loud, competitive, macho posturing (like when one guy picks up an ax like a bat and bets he can chop a pitched ball in two) and fleeting moments of surprising tenderness. They’re establishing pecking orders, creating hierarchies, and discovering who will lead and who will follow. Power shifts and friendships develop in loose hangout scenes with typical Linklater displays of relaxed, casual writing, sharp specificities and fine observation slipping by with how easily it flows.

An occasionally exhausting ramble floating from one vignette to another, Linklater is perhaps a bit too warmly indulgent in portraying their endless partying ways. But the longer the film spends seeing their single-minded pursuits of intoxication, objectification, and competition, it’s possible to see the limitations of such a lifestyle. The second half of the film invites in a welcome feminine presence as our lead strikes up a sweetly adorable budding relationship with a theater major (Zoey Deutch). It’s not like the hookups the others constantly pursue. In fact, he’s a little worried his new roommates’ embarrassing behaviors will ruin his chances with this nice young lady. If college is about finding out what kind of person one wants to be, here’s a movie following a young man’s initial encounters with a sampler of male behaviors. By the end, as he’s drawn out of their sweaty grasp and into flirtatious banter with a possible girlfriend, it’s obvious his learning process has only just begun. Classes are starting, and his whole life is ahead of him. Hopefully he’ll be awake for the frontiers he’s yet to discover.

Life. Time. BOYHOOD

The magic of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is that he breathes new life into the coming-of-age story, a form that can easily feel overfamiliar, by supplying an epic sweep through nothing more and nothing less than a life lived before our very eyes. It’s not an isolated moment in a boy’s life that forever changes the character’s path and personhood. It’s a boy’s life, earnestly and compassionately allowed the time and space to grow on screen. A linear progression of naturalistic scenes follows the boy, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), from age 6 to 18. He’s inquisitive, artsy, loveable. He’s growing, learning, evolving, in a constant state of discovering more about the world and about himself.

Filmed over the course of 12 years with the same cast, the final product has the visual effect and emotional connection of watching in one go all of the Harry Potters – explicitly referenced here, read as bedtime stories and featured in a scene at a midnight release party – or Apted’s Up series or Truffaut’s Doinel films – implicit inspirations. Over the course of nearly three hours, the film sees Mason age, his face, posture, hair, and physicality a guide to the passage of time in this loosely played but rigorously plotted experience. The story of its filming would be a gimmick if it wasn’t so effective. It’s quiet and thoughtful, moving in its breadth of observation. This isn’t a film concerned only with this boy, or boyhood, but about being alive, about now.

For the first stretch of the film, we watch Mason, his single mother (Patricia Arquette), and his slightly older sister (Lorelei Linklater), observing their working-class suburban Texas life, school, work, play. On rare visits, their dad (Ethan Hawke) takes them places – bowling alleys, fast food joints, baseball games. He talks to them, inadvertently revealing strains of conflict in the estranged parental relationships as he advertantly speaks candidly with fatherly advice and about his politics and philosophical worldview. Though side characters come and go, these four remain constant, a portrait of a modern family living and loving through good times and difficulties. Mason’s boyhood is just one part of their story.

Mason is an observer of his family’s dramas, best represented by early scenes in which the little boy stares at a dead bird in the yard, giggles at the lingerie section of a catalog, watches cartoons, listens to the muffled sounds of his mother’s voice in the other room, and spies his parents arguing in the driveway. He’s soaking up the story unfolding around him, a narrative he was born into. The boy is buffeted by the dramas of the adults in his life until he’s old enough to generate some drama of his own. By his teen years, he’s become a more active participant, clashing with his mother’s new romances, finding puppy love, navigating drugs, alcohol, sex, part-time jobs, and artistic impulses. Friends come and go. Years pass; schools change; conflicts bubble up and retreat. Life is lived.

It’s absorbing, built from 12 years worth of filming on and off and yet able to maintain a consistent mood and tone. Linklater and his team – cinematographers Lee Daniel and Shane F. Kelly, editor Sandra Adair, production designers Rodney Becker and Gay Studebaker, costume designer Kari Perkins – create a consistent, believable space. The homes feel lived in. The clothes fit like the actors wore them from home. It’s a convincingly real place and time, filled with apt signifiers of the time. Linklater surrounds his characters with current events and pop culture, everything from the obvious hit songs on the soundtrack (Coldplay, Britney Spears, Sheryl Crow, Gnarls Barkely, Soulja Boy, and more) to the evolving technology – from flip phones to iPhones, from Oregon Trail to Wii – to the Iraq War, the recession, and the election of Barack Obama. These time-capsule moments flavor the background and the atmosphere while the focus remains tightly on the experience of moving through time with this family.

Generously portioned, Linklater removes the typical catalysts for coming-of-age change, no wild misery or traumatic death or disease. Instead he supplies a variety of situations that acknowledge the way people and problems drift through life, characters and conflicts important for a time and then gone, perhaps returning later, perhaps not. The film unfolds patiently and pleasantly at its own unhurried pace. Typical home movie and family melodrama landmarks both big – weddings, divorces, births, moves, graduations – and smaller – birthdays, holidays – play out off screen, time moving forwards through suggestion and implication. What we do see are slice-of-life situations that play out with a powerful empathy deeply felt and tenderly portrayed. That’s not to say the movie is devoid of conflict or dramatic turns. It has break-ups, alcoholism, big decisions, and emotional discoveries. But it’s situated between movie-ish construction and realist document in a thrillingly relaxed way.

Linklater uses long takes and smooth cuts, trusting us to fill in the story between the passing years with context clues. He’s a great screenwriter with a fine ear for dialogue and a director with a fine guiding hand with performers of all kinds, veteran actors, children, and non-professionals alike. Here conversations play out shaggily, laughter and melancholy mingle as scenes becoming story, small details build to a big picture. There’s an ease to the performances and scenarios that feels just right, key moments crystallized as memories, fleeting remembrances. It’s not Tree of Life stream-of-consciousness, but instead a present-tense waking life, potent and evocative in its gentle immediacy, living in the moment each moment. The small revelation: “It’s always now.”

In movies as diverse (and yet so clearly from the same artist) as Dazed and Confused, the Before Sunrise trilogy, Waking Life, School of Rock, and Bernie, Linklater’s intelligent and empathetic approach to moments and lived experiences creates films with modest, appealing surfaces and deep wells of emotion and truth. His visual clarity and sympathetic understanding of nuances in his characters behaviors and environs is so confident and unselfconscious it’s easy to take for granted. But its effect is overwhelming, and his style cannot be dismissed. In Boyhood, Linklater covers a lot of ground, but the project hangs together, incident and character alike, because it converts the small and intimate everyday moments into an epic that uses time as its landscapes, and ordinary life as its grandest adventure.

It’s a movie about how slow the process of growing up and maturing can be, how the cumulative effects don’t guarantee you’ll figure everything out. It emphasizes the importance of timing to both setbacks and serendipitous moments of beauty, clarity, and transcendence. It’s about change. We watch it quite literally, written across the actors ages, and as scenes add up to a portrait of a family as well as a childhood, dynamics changing, relationships evolving. But it’s also in the way people change, places change, situations change. People move. People reconsider decisions. People grow apart. Throughout his boyhood, Mason is confronted with people who represent different paths, different ideas, different outcomes. By the end, Boyhood movingly looks upon all this change and possibility and says it’s okay. It’s natural. It’s a part of life. You'll grow, change, move on.

Smartly constructed, the movie starts from its irresistible gimmick and gets deeper, more complicated and moving until it feels full to the bursting with heart and compassion. There’s the weight of a real life in this film, in its making, its structure, its story. It’s a movie of deep truths about the way we live, balanced and beautiful in its humane approach that finds compassion for everyone on screen, recognizing their individuality, their struggle, and their personhood. The actors, from the kids on up to Arquette and Hawke’s astonishingly nuanced work, give extraordinarily consistent performances so fully inhabited and pitched so warmly and effectively on a lively naturalistic level that they appear simply, movingly, as ordinary people in ordinary lives. There’s a genuine emotional intelligence at work here.

It’s present in every scene. I saw it in the mischievous punch a brother sends a sister in the backseat. I saw it in the smile of a little girl passing a note to a little boy in class. I saw it in the fear of kids left behind with an alcoholic. I saw it in the eyes of an elderly couple proudly gifting a Bible and a rifle to a step-grandson who fakes enthusiasm, a delicate empathetic moment, tender, beautifully sad, full of love. (The next scene the boy is taught to shoot and likes it, a warm complication.) I saw it in the tears of a mother sending a child off to college. Life moved too fast. “I thought there’d be more,” she says. A lesser filmmaker might have viewed these scenes and more like them as moments for jokes or judgments, but Linklater balances perspective through mirrored moments, reflections of characters in others, simple gestures with complicated meaning, actions that resonate and return.

For a film so long and rich, it’s deftly shaped, arriving with great power at simple truths. Linklater found in Ellar Coltrane a boy whose open face and intelligent eyes communicate great curiosity and thoughtfulness in a performance that adeptly grows with the young actor. Its no wonder Mason becomes interested in photography. The movie he’s in exhibits a fine eye for casual visual resonance. The opening shot is of the sky, bright blue with perfect clouds rolling by. A six-year-old boy is on the grass, looking up as far as he can see. In the last shot he’s 18, and the vast expanse he’s looking over is the future. Coming of age isn’t an event; it’s a process, a work in progress. We’ve lived this far with his family. Now is now. It’s always now.

Love. Life. BEFORE MIDNIGHT

Richard Linklater is one of the best directors working today, a fact often easily neglected simply because he never seems to be showing off. His films are so expressive and confident that they have no overtly showy facets. And yet, hopping genres effortlessly, in films as diverse as Waking Life, School of Rock, and Bernie, he creates films with gorgeous visual subtlety, sparkling dialogue of ever-so-heightened naturalism, and casually rigorous observational power. Unlike a Spielberg, Scorsese, Tarantino, or Coen brother, Linklater doesn’t wear his virtuosity on his sleeve. He doesn’t and doesn’t have to. He’s simply that good.

His latest film is Before Midnight, a follow up to his 1995 masterpiece Before Sunrise and its just-as-great 2004 sequel Before Sunset. The first film, tender and romantic, introduced us to Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy). In their early twenties, serious and impulsive, they happen to meet on a train crossing Europe and strike up a flirtation. On a whim, Jesse decides to ask her to get off with him in Vienna and spend some time getting to know each other before he has to catch a flight back to the States. Celine, who is on her way back home to Paris, agrees. Together they wander the streets the whole night, engaging in one long winding conversation that’s hopeful and hesitant, offhand and playful. They part without exchanging numbers, left with only memories of one chance connection.

They meet again nine years later. Now he’s a writer on a book tour. His last stop is Paris. She read about his book signing and shows up. They spend the next several hours walking and talking, catching up and wondering what might have been. There’s a moment in Before Sunset in which Hawke looks away and Delpy reaches out to touch his head with her hand. She hesitates, then moves her arm back to her side. It’s an echo of a scene in Sunrise that finds the two of them sitting in a record shop listening booth, shifting their positions and gazes ever so slightly to look at this new person without getting caught doing so and risk letting on just how interested they are in the other. These are films filled with lovely gestures that catch the experience of hesitation in romanticism, where the potential for love eludes for no particular reason other than a pause between total connection and complete comfort.

It has been nine more years, for them and for us. Before Midnight finds them once again spending time together, this time in Greece. Because part of the fun of this new film is finding out what has transpired between them since we last saw them, I’ll avoid specifics and instead focus on the emotions of it all. When they were first on screen together in 1995, they were young, their lives ahead of them. The connection they made was based on philosophies and personalities. When they met again, they still enjoyed talking art and politics, but now as adults in their thirties, experiences, insecurities, and practicalities entered the picture. Now their conversations are richer and longer, not better, but the product of passing time.

Their relationship has changed, even as they engage in conversations around the topic of change, around what they have done with their lives and how much time may be left. There’s a mortality and morality added to their decisions that youthful romance had no time for. These exceedingly truthful films have not grown smarter, but more knowledgeable as these characters have aged. This is a rare Hollywood romance that’s swooningly sensitive, prickly and intimate, in full acknowledgment that a relationship is an evolution that must be cared for and maintained. Differences grow, and so do commonalities. Jesse and Celine, smart, articulate people, have devolved both comfort and conflict so that, as we listen to them, we can watch rhetorical missteps and argumentative fallacies rise up on both sides, and fade away, or not, as the conversations continue.

Unlike the earlier films, relatively trim 80-minute affairs, Midnight runs nearly thirty minutes longer. Rather than one long conversation, this one is loosely structured around three: the first in one unbroken shot through the dashboard of a car, the second around a dinner table with friends, the third down the streets of a Grecian village and into a more private space. What we see play out is nothing less than a virtuosic duet between two actors who have lived with these characters for almost their entire careers and allow their characters’ histories and personalities to fully inform each and every exchange right down to the diction. Hawke and Delpy co-wrote the screenplay with Linklater, who, in his direction, unobtrusively sits with these characters and lets them puzzle through deep thoughts, shallow reactions, ambiguous emotions and complicated concerns. It’s a patience few films allow and which reaps only rich rewards here.

The product of generous collaboration, Before Midnight draws upon a rich fount of subtext and backstory to sketch out another period of time with these people. What started as one affectionate, extraordinarily literate and perceptive indie picture has grown into a three-part small-scale epic about two lives that have intertwined over a nearly twenty year period. It’s a film that’s unblinkingly honest and achingly intimate, and yet all the more romantic for it. It is as funny as it is sad, as warm as it is raw, as comfortable as it is candid. It feels honest and real because Linklater is so humane a filmmaker and his actors so flawlessly genuine. Here’s a film that doesn’t look away for one second in considering the messy emotions between two people who’ve known of each other for a long time. And here’s a film that makes the work of a relationship look worth pursuing. Find people, find someone, you like talking to, the film seems to be saying, and your life can’t be all bad. Great conversation, like great films, like great art, is worth finding and cherishing. This is a great film.

Good Ol' Boy: BERNIE

Like Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!, Richard Linklater’s Bernie is a based-on-a-true-story film that takes its stranger-than-fiction facts and plays them as dark, character-driven comedy. Also like Soderbergh, Linklater is a director who debuted in the late-80’s in independent film and has spent his career dabbling in different genres. What makes his work so strong and distinctive across genres is not his virtuoso stylistic touches, but his strong, steady focus on characters and a keen eye for the ways in which people relate to one another. From early successes like Before Sunset and Dazed and Confused, to more experimental works like Waking Life, to big studio hits like School of Rock, he’s a director with a sharp sense of interpersonal dynamics and an ability to fit his shaggy observational tone into highly entertaining packages.

Bernie reteams Linklater with his School of Rock star Jack Black. That film is a career highlight for the both of them, a Hollywood comedy in which they embrace a formula – goofball grows up by unwittingly learning from time spent with little kids – into which they can inject a welcome authenticity and emotion behind the laughs. Though Bernie has plenty of laughs, the two of them are up to something much trickier, a dance of tones that is often very funny, but much more complicated and darker. Black plays Bernie Tiede, an assistant funeral director in the small Texas town of Carthage. He has a natural ease in his chosen profession. He’s a master at preparing the bodies, guiding bereaving families through funeral options (or just helping older couples planning ahead, pick out just the right casket), and even steps in to read scriptures or sing a song when necessary. He does this for the local Methodist church as well, singing his heart out to all the great old hymns to much adulation from the congregation.

What earns Bernie the respect and love of the townspeople is his incredible generosity. He’s a giver, not a taker, quick to lend a hand or to drop by unannounced with tokens of appreciation or care packages. He’s especially good with the weeping widows of the town, bringing them baked goods or baskets of fancy soaps, dropping by to make sure they’re doing fine in their trying time. He’s a real people person who seems perfectly comfortable in his own skin. Some wonder about the man who seems uninterested in “normal” things. He’s a source of much speculation, but it’s all so innocuous to the townsfolk. Why, he’s Bernie! Everybody loves Bernie! And it’s easy to see why. Black could easily have played the man as a bundle of comic tics, but he really digs deep and makes Bernie a fully believable eccentric. It’s a fantastic performance. Black seems to walk differently, carries his weight in a ramrod-straight posture, and puts on an accent that can only be described as a lisping Texan drawl, but he comes across as a man so genuinely nice and even-keel that you’re surprised when little flashes of annoyance and despair crack through.

Bernie’s so sweet and caring, and it all seems so honestly and truly genuine, that it invites much affection reciprocated back at him. Still, beloved as he is, it’s very much a surprise when the meanest lady in town (Shirley MacLaine), lonely and bitter and, to the locals, a legendarily ornery creature, lets him dote on her after her husband’s passing. She’s filthy rich and quickly lets Bernie into her life as something of a surrogate son and servant to help her spend her money and pass the time in her remaining years. They take vacations together, attend local plays and concerts, and marinate in high culture. Soon, though, she has him waiting on her every whim, doing her laundry, giving her rides, sorting her pills, and even clipping her toenails. But Bernie’s such a nice guy he won’t tell her no, even when she gets increasingly jealous of time he spends away from her. Why, he can’t even focus on his lead role in the local civic theater’s upcoming production of The Music Man. But they seem to enjoy each other’s company. “No one’s been this nice to me in fifty years,” the old woman says in a poignant moment that reveals some of the deep pain behind her outward nastiness.

I dare not spoil where their increasingly co-dependent relationship spirals down to. Needless to say, the community is increasingly curious about just what brings and holds together the nicest man and the meanest woman they know. Linklater tells the story as a flurry of gossip through which the real story peeks through by filming townspeople, both actors (like a surprisingly subtle and funny Matthew McConaughey as a lawyer who breaks through the town’s innocuous curiosity with his aggressive skepticism) and actual Carthage, Texas locals, talking to the camera in documentary-style talking-head interviews about their town in general and Bernie in particular. He’s a showy character, but he doesn’t seem to be faking it. The townspeople have a lot of theories, and lots of convictions, about who Bernie is and what he did or did not do to that mean woman, but no one can say for sure what went on in Bernie’s mind. In that way, it becomes a film about storytelling and about the interpretation of facts that allows it to transcend a mere docudrama and become something stranger, funnier and, funnily enough, sadder. In this film, fiction (of the film and of the real-life townspeople’s speculations) and nonfiction (both the true story and the real people interspersed with the actors) sit side-by-side, inescapably intertwined.

It’s such a great small-town portrait, a film about a town that picks-a-little talks-a-little like Meredith Wilson’s small-town Iowa, always chattering about this and that and who’s doing what. It’s a place where assumptions become pretty hard to shake. The people have such a fierce protection of those who are genuinely liked and a sharp condemnation of those who aren’t, that it’s easy to see how interpretations of things as simple as fact get all twisted about. This is a film about American eccentrics that allows for the beauty of local color and the joys of colloquial aphorisms and thick regional accents. There’s relaxed, nonjudgmental appreciation of the eccentric in all of its characters, both real and those who are real but played by actors.

It’s a film that’s laughing with its characters and ready to turn quickly into effective pathos when the emotions run raw. Like in the writings Sherwood Anderson or Garrison Keillor, there’s a great sense of place and the way communities interact to embrace or reject the collection of wonderful characters that inhabit and odd incidents that occur within its boundaries. This is a film about the stories that townsfolk tell about themselves and about their town, but most importantly it’s about Bernie. He’s such a fascinating character; it’s easy to wonder to what extent he’s in denial about the relationship he has found himself in. Black plays his complexities expertly. The writing in this film from Linklater and co-writer Skip Hollandsworth is so sharply funny and darkly moving that it can’t be written off as mere condescension or poking fun at real people and real events. It’s a complexly clever and moving film about the way we draw assumptions about people and how hard those assumptions can be to shake. Why, at the end of the film, one local woman insists, “Jesus himself couldn’t change [her] mind about Bernie.”