Review of Dazed and Confused (1993) by Kenneth L — 25 Apr 2015

This was the fourth Richard Linklater movie I've watched in the past couple of months, after Waking Life, Boyhood, and Slacker. While I wouldn't say this one was my favorite of the four (that would be Slacker, actually), it's still a very enjoyable little film.

Linklater seems obsessed with experimenting with time - Slacker chronicled a single day, Boyhood encompassed twelve years, the Before Trilogy shows us individual days years apart from each other. This film, like Slacker, takes place over a single day and night, though the day happens to be the last day of school before summer in 1976.

There are a lot of comparisons to be made to George Lucas's American Graffiti, which in the '70s did a similar nostalgia-trip for the '50s. Both films follow large groups of characters as they just sort of hang out and get into trouble on the last day of school.

Both films also have very well-chosen wall-to-wall period soundtracks. Most of the characters aren't developed beyond being two-dimensional, but that feels right for this sort of film. There are tons of great performances here, though of course it's especially fun to see young versions of Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey.

If this film isn't as explicitly or implicitly philosophical as much of Linklater's other work, it doesn't need to be. It works for what it is: film as memory of a time that wasn't objectively all that long before, but now seems forever gone.