Any director worth their salt knows their strengths. Scorsese has New York and the mob; Allen has New York and neurosis; Tarantino has pop culture and cursing; Bergman had Sweden, bleakness, and death. To me, one of the marks of an interesting director — an interesting artist of any stripe, really — is a willingness, even, perhaps, a compulsion, to return to the same subject matter at regular intervals.
To some it might seem like laziness. Call it the Pollock Effect: “Sure he’s good, but he just keeps making the same painting!” But anyone who has dabbled in the arts will recognize it for what it is: a return to known ground that allows an artist to fulfill several needs important to further growth. One can spend years drawing the human figure, until every proportion and detail is exactly as it should be. But then one can spend years more drawing the same seemingly perfect figure, trying to get at all the messy emotions still lurking at deeper levels.
For director Richard Linklater (Boyhood), young men and women on the verge of change are one of those recurring themes. In films like Slacker, the Before trilogy, and especially Dazed and Confused, Linklater has explored the peculiar mix of emotions that come with being grown up enough to make your own rules, but still young enough to not know how far they can be bent. In the new film Everybody Wants Some!! (the exclamation points — yes, both of them — are his), the director conjures up a world that feels like a hazy sequel to Dazed and Confused. It’s not the same cast or characters, but the milieus are similar — Texas in Linklater’s meticulously re-crafted 1970s and ’80s — as are some of the details: athletes, stoners, and intellectuals coming together, intermingling for a bit, and again shooting off, a bit wiser, perhaps, about the human condition. For Linklater, it’s a chance to tell an earlier story through older eyes.
Blake Jenner (Glee) stars as Jake, an incoming baseball player at a Texas university where all the players share a team house. It’s a swirling stew of male energies, and the movie is a forthright mix of the preoccupations so common to the situation: the never-ending thoughts of casual sex, a lot of weed smoking, and dude-on-dude bits of one-up-manship. Along the way, he falls for a theater major (Zoey Deutch) and begins to expand his horizons. But if one expects a film where the jocks are the bad guys and the brains win the day, Linklater isn’t going to provide so simple a conclusion. As the title suggests, everyone here is in it together, and out for the same thing.
Also this week: Amherst Cinema inaugurates its Bellwether Film Series with a Thursday evening screening of Kirsten Johnson’s film Cameraperson. The series, which grew out of the theater’s collaboration with Hampshire College’s Creative Media Institute, seeks out new voices in film who are exploring fresh approaches to filmmaking, and helps bring those filmmakers and their works to live audiences Johnson will be on hand to discuss her work.
Johnson has worked as a cinematographer on dozens of documentary films, including Citizenfour and Fahrenheit 9/11, and has also done duty as director on three of her own features, but Cameraperson is perhaps her most personal. A story of what it means to film another person — what it does to the person being filmed, as well as how it changes the person behind the camera — it draws on a trove of footage she has shot for others, and reframes those moments to show how they affected not only the films that they were a part of originally, but also how they changed the woman who captured them. Sometimes we struggle to recall the small moments that have changed us, but Johnson is lucky: she was rolling film on so many of them.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
