by Brendan Foley
With Everybody Wants Some (!!), now on Blu-ray and DVD it’s tempting to simply enjoy the rush of nostalgia and good vibrations that come with Richard Linklater’s warm glow of a period comedy. EWS (!!) is largely plotless, instead devoting its energies towards capturing the long, lazy weekend before college kicks off. Jake (Blake Jenner, Supergirl’s hubby) is a freshman, newly arrived to college on a baseball scholarship. The movie follows him through a weekend of parties, competitions, and the kind of philosophical (or pseudo-philosophical as the case may be) conversations between the stoners and seekers that Linklater has lovingly documented since day one of his professional career.
But lingering beneath the needle drops and the obnoxious fashion is a profound sense of melancholy, a bittersweet awareness that these golden days are, by definition, limited. When EWS (!!) was announced, much was made of the film being a spiritual successor to Linklater’s masterpiece, Dazed and Confused. But there’s a key difference between how the high schoolers of the film and the college kids of EWS (!!) react to their world. Namely, Dazed and Confused was about cynical kids, but the film itself was idealistic and optimistic. The boys at the center of Everybody Wants Some (!!) are upbeat and enthusiastic, but the film has a knowing sadness about what is waiting for them beyond the weekend depicted here.
That melancholy never announces itself in any overt ways. Linklater remains perhaps the great modern American master of what Quentin Tarantino would call a “hang out” movie, movies where you just sit with characters you like and listen to them chit and/or chat. Linklater’s dialogue is stylized and exacting, but not in a way that calls attention to itself. Take the scene where Jake and some other guys get blazed and start yammering on about the Twilight Zone and telekinetic abilities. The approach most modern comedies would take to this scene would be to set up three or four cameras and let everyone riff and riff and riff, then cutting a ten-minute sequence of the choicest bits. But Linklater’s script feels loose while being rigid, setting up massive laughs while also furthering the themes that underline the movie.
This viewing, I was thinking a lot about Linklater’s place in our canon of great filmmakers. Until Boyhood got anointed with awards-season glory, it was starting to seem like the guy who in many ways launched the American indie film as we know it (yes, there’s Jarmusch and Sex, Lies and Videotape, and a whole host of other sources and originators. But Linklater’s Slacker is the movie that touched off the indie revolution and influenced the feel of what a modern “independent” movie feels like, for better or worse) was falling by the wayside. Linklater didn’t drop off the face of the earth like some of his colleagues, he didn’t flame out into self-parody the way a Kevin Smith or a Robert Rodriguez did (btw, I saw Sin City 2 recently and it was so bad I got angry at my younger self for ever having taken either Rodriguez or Frank Miller seriously), but he also didn’t wrestle the system to the ground and ride it, the way the Tarantinos or David O. Russells have. Linklater seems happiest working to the beat of his own drum, occupying his own weird corner of the movie world. That’s great, but it also means that this true American original does not often get his due.
Which is why it is so gratifying to see him hit a movie like this out of the park. Linklater’s been at this for almost thirty years, and yet EWS (!!) remains as curious and open a film experience as Slacker, Dazed, or Before Sunrise. Linklater, as writer and director, still comes across as punch-drunk in love with the human experience, with all the disparate ideas and beliefs and concepts that we strange creatures fill the world with in an attempt to make sense out of the chaos that we experience each day. He eschews easy drama or narrative, instead floating on gentle waves of experience and sensation. If he’s an older, wiser man than he was when he first ran around Austin filming that one lady auctioning Madonna’s pap smear (watch Slacker, you guys), that wisdom only makes him more appreciative of the foolishness that comes so easily to young seekers.
Everybody Wants Some (!!) just hums, from its opening swagger to its closing quietude. With a tremendous cast of young actors (including Tyler Hoechlin, newly cast as Superman on The CWverse), Everybody Wants Some (!!) more than earns a space on your DVD/Blu shelf. Exuberant and quietly wise, this is a film you will revisit again and again.
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