Slacker
Inspired by my rewatch of Before Sunrise, I decided to turn on Slacker, which was Linklater's directorial debut, and considered a gem in its own right. It is hard not to understand why this film immediately cemented Linklater into the vanguard of independent cinema: it is an incredibly self-assured film.
It does two rare things:
- It succeeds at what it is trying to produce.
- It produces something that is not just of value, but of novelty as well.
Rather than follow any specific character or semblance of plot, we follow a Rube Goldberg collection of the titular slackers — a clear bit of formalism that Linklater later refines in Dazed and Confused and especially Everybody Wants Some! — and we spend a couple minutes with one character who interacts with another character, transitions to another character, and so on and so forth. The result is a tapestry of interesting dialogues and characters who manage to escape feeling one-note or game-y despite their limited presence.
This conceit feels, at times, as if Linklater's really straining the format to fit the runtime: the artifice outpaces the value. He's interested, clearly, in the richness of experience, not the same way Altman is, but the commitment to the bit draws a bit too much attention to itself.
None of this is to say that Slacker isn't a good time. Just like all of Linklater's films, it feels honest and transportative and fun. Characters are given enough breath and setting is given enough fidelity that the artifice drops away and you feel like you yourself are wandering the streets of early 90s Austin, running into character after character, all of whom have something interesting to say.
If there's a serious complaint to lodge against Linklater in this film, it's that he is too willing to play the role of idle documentarian and does not yet know how to stitch all of the things that he gathers into a cohesive thesis, as he does in his later works. The result is a film that cannot be accused of being unentertaining or generic, but also not one that quite pierces the human condition — which is not a bad result for a directorial debut.