Richard Linklater is a director fascinated by the time in between.
This seems like a very obvious statement. After all, Linklater is still (relatively) fresh from a slew of nominations for Boyhood, a film that was famous for being shot with the same cast over the course of years and allowing the audience to literally watch its central character grow and develop. Many critics argued that the film was nothing more than a gimmick, a piece of performance art more than a narrative. Of course, the gimmick was largely the point of the film. Linklater is a director fascinated with the passage of time; Boyhood pushes that to the limit.
Of course, it is also interesting what Linklater does with his sense of time. Many of Linklater’s films unfold against the backdrop of a deadline. Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight build their deadlines into the title. Dazed and Confused follows a bunch of students on the last day of school. Everybody Wants Some!! operates with a literal countdown the ticks from the moment that Jake arrives at his college dorm to the start of his college classes. In theory, the film runs up against the clock.
However, Linklater’s deadlines tend to be arbitrary. His films are never race-to-the-finish thrillers as one might expect. Rarely are those precious few hours and minutes filled with important life-changing decisions and profound conversations. Instead, they are filled with a celebratory glimpse of the mundane, more extraordinary for their ordinariness. If anything, they feel like collective pauses; they are a deep breath before jumping back into life, a moment taken out of time, the last few hours before the clock really starts ticking.
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: everybody wants some, film, Movie, non-review review, review | 4 Comments »
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