Can someone please explain to me what the big fucking deal
about Richard Linklater is? No, really,
I genuinely don’t get it. I will admit
that I am not familiar with his early work, but his previous film Boyhood was a merely interesting
cinematic experiment that received overblown claims of perfection for reasons
that I cannot fathom. And now
Linklater’s latest, Everybody Wants Some,
is receiving similar praise, though I might have an explanation as to why this time. And it’s not for the right reasons.
To detail the plot of Everybody
Wants Some is an exercise in futility, because it unapologetically has
none. Set in the 1980s over the course
of a weekend leading up to the first day of college, the film follows the
exploits of a baseball team living off-campus in their pursuit of hooking up
with girls and getting ready for the school year and sports season. Ostensibly our protagonist is Jake, a new
freshman who is just finding his footing among his new teammates, but he has no
character arc to speak of so he merely acts as an audience point-of-view
character to a series of disjointed episodes.
In fact, almost none of the film’s large cast deals with any
sort of emotional journey, and those who do are subject to the whims of
convenience and brevity. A film this
aggressively atypical in its story presentation needs to have strong characters
to substitute the traditional narrative, but Everybody Wants Some is content to let each of its characters, none
of whom I bothered to learn the name of, embody the same sports-bro headspace
while distinguishing them from one another with the most threadbare of
archetypal traits, from the stoner to the loudmouth to the too-cool guy to et
cetera.
The film’s attempt at providing depth for any of Linklater’s
mouthpieces is to have them spout shallow philosophy every once and a while,
but none of it carries any sort of narrative significance or revelatory weight
as it relates to the speakers. Not only
do these monologues feel bizarre coming from apparently unintellectual
characters, they don’t seem to exist for any other purpose than to posit the
idea that everyone has the potential to be similarly deep, that everyone has a
story to tell, and that everyone can find purpose to their life. Here’s the problem though: when the narrative
and characters themselves feel like hollow vessels to communicate that idea, an
emotional connection to the audience is difficult to achieve unless they can
relate directly to what’s happening on-screen.
And this is why I think the film is being regarded so
highly. The majority of film critics are
thirty- and forty-something white males, men who grew up in the eighties and
probably had social circles similar to that portrayed by the baseball team. Linklater’s lovingly nostalgic lens for the
era and self-admitted autobiographical nature of this movie makes this
something that men of a certain age will connect with in a certain way, not
because the film’s characters or story are worthwhile, but because they can mentally
see themselves as one of the boys.
However, for those of us who don’t fit into that mold, the experience is
aggressively boring, since these characters aren’t the kinds of people we
associated with nor had the desire to.
As far as I’m concerned, one of the biggest reasons to tell a story is
to inform a new perspective or to at least create an empathetic bridge to the
emotional journey of a character. Everybody Wants Some is only about
making sure its target audience feels good about themselves through shallow
self-insert shenanigans that I rarely found amusing. This one’s for the bros. And only the bros.
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