On Living Linklater with Everybody Wants Some!!

If you’ve never lived in America. Never gone to university on a sports scholarship. Never experienced the frat house, then be prepared to want them all after watching Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! For this is because there is something about all of Richard Linklater’s films. Something unique. Something about the cinematic worlds he creates that is a far more appealing, habitable world than the self titled MCU.

Every Linklater film has the ability to capture your attention and drive it to yearning; a desirous state where you wish you could step through the screen and be transported to, wherever. We watch Before Sunrise (1995) and we want to be traveling Europe, experiencing first love or lust or just figuring it out; we watch School of Rock (2003) and want to teach or be taught in that classroom and learn to love a subject; we watch Boyhood (2014) and want to be cycling through that perfect American suburb. Of course, none of these worlds are perfect. None of Linklater’s films are vacuous. Behind the smokescreens are explorations of masculinity, of parenthood, of love, so finely tuned that they feel like our own. 

With Linklater’s latest, Everybody Wants Some!! we are presented with a light hearted look at a similar narrative in Peter Berg’s Friday Night Lights (2004). Young teenage men trying to find themselves following success in sport. Berg shows us the end of this process as college football players realize that good in college doesn’t mean professional outside of it. Linklater shows us the start of the journey, before the reality has set in.

Everybody Wants Some!! is a fun film, and as with his Before trilogy Linklater draws out performances that feel observed rather than directed. The characters never stop having fun, but as the film progresses we feel the sadness set in. These young men, so high on life, are only set up to enjoy the next few years and in one final scene, Linklater communicates this brilliantly. Our two freshmen, Jake and Plummer, after a heady weekend of sex and alcohol sit in their first class of the academic year. History and the study of imposed borders are the topic. As their professor begins, their eyes close and they drift off to sleep. Their future being no more than the next four years. 

On Stylish Horror with Son of Saul

Son of Saul (2015) is about as harrowing and impressive as a film can get. This story of a working prisoner discovering the body of his son and desperately looking to bury him not only sees the protagonist fail in his quest, but also explores in brutal half focus the mechanics of the Nazi death camps.

The story is a heartbreaking exploration of silent devotion, as Saul must keep secret his motives in a dangerous environment that looks to end his life at every turn.  Relative newcomer Géza Röhrig is very good as Saul, performing the physical demands of the role well and communicating the helplessness of his situation. He is pushed through life, bouncing from one problem to the next. When first watching, Röhrig may seem to convey too little emotion, especially when discovering the body of his son in a pile of corpses, or watching him drift away on a river as his task fails. However, he is so surrounded by danger that his blunted reaction is, it should be expected, contextually appropriate.

Director Nemes’ method of telling this story is striking. The camera follows Saul around, often from behind, trailing him closely, feeling his danger and catching, in his periphery the horror. The shallow focus also blurs much of what surrounds Saul, keeping our attention fixed on his quest, but not disguising the death camps. It is as if Nemes is saying that pain can be so great it blinds out greater horror. Yet, more than commenting on the second world, Son of Saul is a human struggle narrative and a difficult, important film.