Richard Linklater has always seemed a touch out of step with the rest of the world, which is really just about perfect. One of the poster boys for Generation X filmmaking, Linklater’s films have resolutely refused to hear the siren call of cynicism and disinterest that so marks pop culture of his time. Where his contemporaries seemed hellbent on tearing down and inverting the world around them, Linklater has always approached every subject with a wide open, beating heart, and with a hungry sense of curiosity for art, the world, and the weird ass people who live on it.
Think about that scene in Dazed and Confused when the kids are shouting out the episodes from Gilligan’s Island, followed shortly thereafter by the girl in the bathroom giving a lengthy screed about the sexual fantasy aspect of the show. In the hands of almost any other filmmaker, it would be easy to imagine either scene being played for broad, mocking comedy, if they even bothered to include such a small and seemingly meaningless moment in their film. Not Linklater. He wants to remind the audience of the way in which people bond through their memories of pop culture, and to reminisce about those days in high school when it seemed like the whole world was an elaborate mystery which you, and only you, were smart enough to see beyond and decode.
He’s not asking you to laugh at these kids because of what they find entertaining or interesting, but is instead asking you to connect past the screen and the decades to your own idiosyncrasies and oddities.
And that goes for all his films, from the indie triumphs of the Before series, the studio success of School of Rock, even the more avante garde lunacy contained within Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. As disparate as each of these films are on the surface, their linked by that same sense of openness and curiosity, and by a rambling and welcoming spirit of humanity. Also linking each of these films: They all have sizable followings, be it through great box office, endless cable replays, or adoring cult audiences. Rare is the Linklater film that doesn’t find its way into the corner of someone’s heart.
Which brings us to The Newton Boys…
Buried upon initial release and ignored on pretty much all subsequent releases, The Newton Boys marked Linklater’s first foray into studio filmmaking and also marked one the first major leading roles for Matthew McConaughey. Linklater has recently attributed the rampant negativity surrounding the film’s release to a general backlash against his rhapsodically received independent films and McConaughey’s rising star.
Watching the film today, it is easy to appreciate Linklater’s feelings of abandonment and underserved scorn, while also understanding why the film didn’t incite passionate defenders and curious eyes in the same way that similarly abused features such as Brazil or Margaret.
Which is not to say that The Newton Boys is a bad film. Far from it: It carries with it all the hallmarks of Linklater’s best work, from the easy humanism, the shaggy dog narrative style, and his unending delight in the stories of outlaws, misfits and weirdos. Not only is the story a classic fit for Linklater, he was also sure to load the cast with eccentric faces, many of which recurred in his earlier and later films.
So why, when the film has so many hallmarks of classic Linklater, is this Linklater so far from a classic?
Partly it’s the story which can’t help but feel rote by this point in time. The Newtons are a rambunctious pack of brothers scratching out humble lives in Texas when big brother finds his true calling in robbing banks. He recruits his brothers to this new career and things go extremely smoothly until suddenly they don’t. There’s angry detectives and bloody violence and betrayals and One Last Job and blah blah blah. Linklater never feels engaged by these climatic sections, instead hitting the arbitrary beats of the Heist Movie 101 template. The easy defense is that his hands were tied by the true story the film was based off of, but there’s no reason why he couldn’t have found a compelling pacing and engrossing tone.
Hell, Bernie has ten times the tension of this film, and that movie had Jack Black jackblacking things up something fierce for ninety some-odd minutes.
The parts of the film which work best are (unsurprisingly) the places where Linklater feels free to leave the crime story and focus on the interplay between the brothers. Had anyone bothered to see the film, McConaughey would have proven to be a revelation, balancing his laconic charm and blazing charisma with a wild-eyed mania and iron streak that suggests real danger behind the grin.
As the rest of the Newtons, Ethan Hawke, Skeet Ulrich and Vincent D’Onofrio all do strong work and bounce off of each other with real affection and chemistry. When they horse around or argue, they really do come across as men with decades of shared experience and history, and it makes the rambling middle section of the film into the real highlight.
But the demands of the story dictate that the Newtons need to be split up, then left bloodied and beaten. D’Onofrio, I don’t think even has a line in the last half hour of the movie, and Ulrich is similarly abandoned. Even in the extended cut (which runs a full two hours) it feels like great swaths of the movie were trimmed or excised entirely, leaving the balance between the Newtons hopelessly skewed.
In no way did The Newton Boys deserve the fate it got. As flawed as it is, it is also entirely amiable and pleasant, with all of the warmth and geniality that Linklater’s movies tend to contain, scramble-suit-containing ones excepted. Hell, if all you want is to see how effective a movie star McConaughey could be before the romantic comedy machine chewed him up before he burst back to life like Neo punting Agent Smith down the fucking hallway at the end of that movie, Boys is well worth the watch.
Mostly though, The Newton Boys feels best viewed as a curiosity, a weird moment in the lives of several wildly talented people when they were filled with pure potential and still searching for that perfect outlet for that creativity. Even if they didn’t hit it here, the search itself is fascinating in its own right and worth studying.
Kinda… wow, kinda like you’d see in a Richard Linklater movie.