Review of Slacker (1990) by Kenneth L — 14 Mar 2015

I've watched three Richard Linklater movies in the past week: this one, Waking Life, and the much-praised Boyhood. While there's a great deal to admire in all three, this one might actually be my favorite of the bunch, and would be right up there with Before Sunset as one of my favorite Linklater movies overall. As small and seemingly insignificant as this movie may be, I think in some ways it more completely fulfills its ambitions than do Waking Life or Boyhood. It's also, due to its unique format, endlessly watchable; the movie is 1 hour and 45 minutes long, but I don't think I would've minded had it been 3 hours long.

This movie, which wasn't actually Linklater's first but is the earliest one anyone seems to know about, is the first in his ongoing series of cinematic experiments with time. The Before trilogy is all about checking in with two characters on particular days years apart from each other; Boyhood follows one character for 12 years. Here, Linklater's experiment went in the opposite direction from that of Boyhood: rather than follow one character for a long time, he follows dozens and dozens of characters for a few minutes each over the course of a single day in Austin, Texas in 1990 or 1991. Some of them do interesting or bizarre things: a young man runs his mother over in a car and then has some sort of bizarre ceremony in his house; another guy is trying to watch ten TVs at once; an old man finds someone trying to rob his house and takes him out for a pleasant walk to talk about politics. Other people are just going about a fairly normal day: a woman walks to a coffee shop; some kids play in the woods; a young woman argues with her boyfriend. No matter what's going on, though, the film is never boring; most of the characters are oddballs or weirdos of some sort, though not outlandishly so.

It's a somewhat difficult film to evaluate in conventional terms, since it doesn't really concern itself with a narrative. I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed watching it, and its portrayal of college town life was pretty convincing to me. The Austin portrayed in this film reminded me a bit of Carrboro, North Carolina, where I live now; watching the movie almost makes me want to go make my own version of Slacker about the people living here. I really appreciated how smoothly Linklater's direction transitions us from one little story to the next. Purely from an entertainment perspective, it's nice to know that if you don't like one story or character, it'll be replaced by something else soon. The movie is funny and relaxed; it's the sort of movie I imagine would be easy to rewatch in later years. It's interesting, and kind of inspiring, how Linklater's totally naturalistic, low-key approach to filmmaking, which tends to make me think, "Hmm, I could do that!," still yields such fascinating results. If you're at all interested in Linklater, Austin, or the 90s in general, I definitely recommend Slacker.