Film review by Kevin Patterson
Slacker Rating: *** (out of four) R, 1991 Directed and written by Richard Linklater.
Richard Linklater's "Slacker," made in 1991 for a budget of only $23,000, immerses itself in the twentysomething, college-town culture of Austin, Texas. Most of these characters are either unemployed or work jobs that are apparently too menial to be worth mentioning. Their lifestyle is a sort of passive resistance to the idea that people should go out and actively pursue a career after graduation; they seem content to sit around spouting off about the inadequacy of American democracy, the pervasiveness of slave morality, the subtle messages in pop culture, and such. Ask them what they've been doing lately, and they'll more likely than not reply, "Oh, you know, just hanging out." Linklater uses an interesting technique to examine these characters: the camera follows one person for a few minutes, then someone else walks by and the camera follows that person, who walks into a diner just as another person is walking out the door . . . .
It's certainly a lot of fun listening to these characters talk: some of them are clearly very intelligent and have some genuinely insightful ideas, some of them are just plain weird, and some of them think their ideas are a lot more profound than they really are. The opening monologue, delivered by Linklater himself to a taxi driver, tosses around ideas about alternate realities that nicely set up the meandering structure of the film. Other characters along the way offer observations about everything from dating relationships to the history of anarchist philosophy, while groups of pseudo-intellectuals kick around ideas about the nobility of sitting around and doing nothing or the subtle bribery-based morality in "Scooby-Doo."
For the most part, however, the best moments are the ones involving the slightly unhinged types. Near the beginning, a paranoid man follows a pedestrian for several blocks, warning him about government conspiracies involving everything from global warming to secret colonization of Mars. Another man seems to be collecting televisions, keeping at least fifteen sets running at the same time and playing tapes of a graduate student who recorded himself having a nervous breakdown and destroying the camera. And in a scene that drew a big laugh from everyone present when I saw the film, a man tries to achieve closure after a failed relationship by reciting poetry on a bridge and then throwing a typewriter into the creek below.
The only problem with "Slacker" is that it starts to run out of steam towards the end. Since Linklater only spends a few minutes with each character, the introduction of the new characters gets repetitive after a while. There are only so many times you can hear, "Hey, what's going on?" "Not much, what are you up to?" "Nothing really, just hanging around," before it gets on your nerves; the film might well have benefited from a slightly slower pace and a little bit more characterization. And the dialogue in the second half of the film is by and large not quite as interesting as that in the first half; a JFK buff, for example, seems like a pale imitation of the previous conspiracy theorist, and many of the characters just generally aren't as weird or unique. Instead of depicting a city populated by mostly normal people and then showing us the strangeness that we might not have noticed at first, Linklater shows us the oddballs first, then stops and reminds us that ordinary people live there too.
"Slacker" is a good film and a wonderfully offbeat and entertaining comedy, whatever its flaws, and its status as a cult classic is well-deserved. I just can't help but think it might have been even better if Linklater had slowed down a little bit and filmed these scenes in reverse order.
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