Twenty years ago, in Dazed and Confused, the largely unknown writer-director Richard Linklater offered up an indelible portrait of America in the 1970s in the guise of a conventional R-rated teen movie. Now, in 2016, the garlanded Linklater has brought us a conventional R-rated teen movie in the guise of a highly anticipated follow-up picture by a filmmaker whose last motion picture dazzled the world.
I don’t remember when I’ve been as let down by a movie as much as I was by his new Everybody Wants Some, a plotless two hours featuring actors in their late twenties trying (and mostly failing) to come across as college baseball players in their late teens on a Texas campus in 1980. If watching others drink, smoke dope, play pinball, chase girls, and engage in mostly uninteresting banter while “My Sharona” plays in the background is your thing, then Everybody Wants Some is the movie for you. As for me, I was in college in 1980, and I found all that stuff mostly tedious; reliving the experience 36 years later didn’t improve matters much.
The movie has its charms, as all Linklater pictures do (when his characters aren’t engaging in pretentious pseudo-literary banter). He has an offhandedly masterly style; his movies just seem to happen, unfolding right in front of you, and casual grace of this kind is actually extraordinarily difficult to achieve. You glide along with them. But nothing happens in Everybody Wants Some, and I mean nothing. It takes place over four days, during which our protagonist Jake arrives at college, meets a cute girl, goes around town with his new baseball team buddies, has one practice, and then goes to a history class. That’s it. Really.
The only variety here involves the differences among the bars and the parties. They go from disco dancing to Cotton Eye Joe-ing to mosh-pitting, so we get a full tour d’horizon of the musical styles and tastes of the era. And after they throw their own frat-like party, surfing down staircases on mattresses, they attend an artsy happening where the sight of cross-dressers and dominatrixes occasions barely a double-take from these small-town 1980s boys. That is just one of the many ways Linklater, who was himself a college baseball player in 1980s Texas, is looking back at the wondrousness of his youth with rose-colored social-liberal-from-Austin glasses.
He is also looking back with fondness at the movies he and his teammates probably watched together at the drive-in. He pays homage to them here with pointedly gratuitous displays of casual female nudity, which seem to be designed to remind us that those pre-AIDS days were simpler, less politically charged, and more innocently hedonistic. That’s nice if you like that sort of thing; but in this as in so many other ways, Everybody Wants Some lacks the bracing qualities that made Dazed and Confused so remarkable.
That 1993 picture, which was also a sketch from memory set on the last day of school 1976, in an Austin suburb, took the form of the classic teenage movie of the nineties, with a first half about various groups of kids getting ready to go to a killer party and the second half set entirely at and around that party. But it was something different, as its indifferent box office results suggested—and its subsequent status as one of the best American films of the decade has proved.
Dazed has the distance and perspective of a good autobiographical novel. The party is beside the point. The movie offers a full-blown portrait of the range of characters that populate every high school—and the ways they cross social, class, and behavioral lines. Some of the jocks are artsy, druggy hipsters; some of the outcast nerds aren’t sad and sensitive but obnoxious and nasty. Oddballs in their twenties hang around looking to make time with high school girls and are tolerated because they can buy beer and secure dope.
Most striking is the town’s casual acceptance of acts of violent aggression by older kids against younger kids as simply part of local tradition. And when the movie ends at sundown, we do not forget that two of the older and more frightening characters have promised to do terrible things to two younger ones later on, and that those things will doubtless come to pass.
Dazed and Confused has us bemused by its characters at one moment and disgusted by them the next, and makes us understand both the attractions of teenage life and the absolute necessity to get beyond it. It’s kind of sweet that what matters most in life to these kids is scoring tickets to an Aerosmith concert, but life is already toughening them up. Dazed and Confused is both fond and unsentimental, and therefore indelible.
Everybody Wants Some promises to reveal major tensions among the players on the baseball team and to make something meaningful out of the competitive spirit that drives these boys. But Linklater pulls back every time from the moments of confrontation that punctuate Dazed and Confused. We’re told the older players resent and fear the younger, but they just pal around and trade wisecracks as though they are characters on a sitcom rather than driven young people who are competitors as well as teammates. Everything that might deepen the movie is lost in a cheerful haze of marijuana smoke.
In the end, Everybody Wants Some is like a speech at a college reunion that begins with funny and sharp observations and ends up with the speaker bawling and saying, “Oh, man, I just LOVE YOU GUYS!” The problem is that we didn’t go to college with him.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
