Saturday, April 30, 2016

Everybody Wants Some!!


For all the praise lavished upon it, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was overburdened by its need to treat its slight coming-of-age tale as a profound state-of-the-union address. By comparison, Everybody Wants Some!! is the director at his loosest and funniest; he’s working in the plotless, discursive mode that has defined much of his strongest work. The film follows the members of a Texas university baseball team in 1980 through the three days before classes begin—essentially the international waters of adulthood, where all laws seem momentarily suspended, after you have left your parents’ watchful eyes but before the realities of post-secondary education have set in. In these giddy first few days of university life, everyone seems as drunk on possibility as they are on, uh, more mundane substances. But Linklater is not simply taking easy shots at horndog jock culture here. He’s diving deep into the hormone-addled tribal dynamics of campus life, and viewers might very well feel at times like amateur anthropologists along for the ride. The first 15 minutes alone could aptly be titled, “Put ‘er there, champ: A study of the ritualistic purposes of handshaking in post-adolescent American athletic subcultures.”

Linklater treats the hyper-competitive, testosterone-fuelled adventures of the group with a fond, if occasionally mocking touch, although nostalgia does admittedly soften the film’s edges at times. Still, nostalgia is a barbed emotion, and its presence is also a sign of things lost. Small conflicts flare up between the teammates only to be muffled by the endless roundelay of parties, but there is a strong sense of future tensions that will push these people in different directions. (You can almost imagine one of those closing 1980s college comedy where-are-they-now montages running over the credits, outlining each person’s diverging life path in a few pithy lines.) Everyone is in the early days of discovering themselves, and it becomes clear as the film progresses not everyone will like what they find. Some seem destined to drop out or fail, others to remain forever outside of the group, and others to abandon the sport that has defined their lives up until that point. If time feels suspended for these three days, that just makes the looming threat of its resumption all the more potent. Fittingly, the film ends with a pair of our raunchy Rip Van Winkles dozing through history class. One suspects their eyes will remain shut until the final exam—and that they’ll wake up screaming.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Knight of Cups


Transcendental beauty—what a racket, huh? Terrence Malick, bless his soul, seems to have carved out a niche for himself manufacturing ready-made profundities from ecstatic imagery and Hollywood stars desperate for artistic cred. Knight of Cups is his latest lament for our lamentable age, featuring an actor (Christian Bale, stupefied) confronting his hollow world as Malick muses upon a host of generic existential agonies: Are we living the life we were meant to live? Has modernity robbed us of our spirituality? Can we borrow a feeling? I say battle not with banality lest ye become banal. Sure, these themes have served as the foundation of as much good art as bad, but here they succumb to the director’s manifold filmmaking weaknesses, which can only be obscured behind the lens flares for so long. Malick is a sensitive misanthrope, yearning to express the quivering ache of human existence while having little actual use for human beings. His improvisatory methods—set everyone loose, run amuck with the camera, stitch it all together in post with voiceovers—reveal an inability to direct actors or craft narratives. There’s actually an arbitrary and implausible home robbery just to show that the main character doesn’t own anything worth stealing. (Cause his life’s, like, empty, you know?) We are not in the presence of a great dramatist.

That need not be a crippling failure for a talented image-maker, but Malick inexcusably falls back again and again on clichés to prop up his pretty pictures. Mercifully, the voiceovers, while blandly spelling out the emotional states of his empty puppet-people, obscure much of the risible dialogue, but we still have to watch hoary nonsense like a family fight ending with everyone throwing furniture around the dining room. Set adrift, the performers all too often fall back on mannerism and overacting—Natalie Portman’s generic adulteress and Brian Dennehy’s histrionic paterfamilias being the worst offenders here—to pierce the impenetrable fog of art that surrounds. Malick’s overreliance on the familiar translates into the visuals as well. Initially stunning, the imagery is essentially a string of all-purpose poetic signifiers, anointed by the gilded touch of an Oscar-winning cinematographer (Emmanuel Lubezki): skyscrapers set against piercing blue skies, awe-struck pans of leaves limned by sunlight, hair whipping in the wind as people laugh and love in a convertible. With Knight of Cups, Malick has at last taken his rightful place as our era’s greatest maker of stock footage. Frankly, his talents are wasted on art. He should be making travel commercials.