Nouvelle Vague

Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” is a movie in which the making of it has become as famous as the movie itself. After all, it not only helped usher in the vital French New Wave filmmaking movement but essentially ushered in modern movies themselves; as no less an authority than Criterion puts it, “there was before ‘Breathless,’ and there was after ‘Breathless.’” But the movie has become so synonymous with its making because more than most, the production and the completed motion picture are wholly intertwined. By utilizing familiar, rulebound Hollywood genres and then reimagining them through rule-breaking techniques, Godard was not only commenting on and critiquing Hollywood but rendering an intrinsic argument that how a director chooses to tell his or her story makes a movie what it is in the first place. If you watch Richard Linklater’s new Netflix movie “Nouvelle Vague” about the making of Breathless having never seen it, you might come away wondering what, exactly, “Breathless” was about as it remains, well, a little vague on that topic. Yet, it still succeeds not because it’s more about the production than the finished product but because in the way that Godard made movies, the finished product was the production, and vice-versa. To see “Breathless” being made is to see “Breathless.” 

If “Breathless” is inseparable from its making, so, too, is it inseparable from its auteur. Famously, Godard infused his movies with quotes and observations reflecting his own attitudes and philosophies and so Linklater has his perpetual sunglasses-wearing Godard (Guillame Marbeck) communicate almost exclusively in quotes and observations, not like one of his characters but to evoke how his characters were him. His filmmaking methods, meanwhile, deploying a moving camera, not even bothering to look through the viewfinder, eschewing continuity, wears his producer (Bruno Dreyfürst) thin while his star, Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), ponders jumping ship. In traditional terms, that might make “Nouvelle Vague” an underdog story, but, of course, we know how this story ends, and it’s a testament to Linklater’s carefree style that the proceedings never turn sentimental or solemn. He is a modern master of the hangout movie, after all, and that’s what “Nouvelle Vague” often resembles, its cast and crew in repose in cafes as Godard consults his notebook, bringing his belief that the movie before him exists as a kind of blank page to leisurely life.

As the title suggests, however, “Nouvelle Vague” is not just about the making of “Breathless” but the French New Wave itself. That’s why we see Godard consulting and socialize with esteemed fellow members of the movement. The ones that Linklater cannot manage to squeeze into the narrative he still honors by identifying them via title card while having them look straight into the camera. Yet, despite being a concise evocation of how it takes village, these cameos belie “Nouvelle Vague” as requiring some prior knowledge of its eponymous film movement; this is not necessarily a movie for beginners. But that’s also what fascinates me. Godard was suspicious of Netflix, and it’s more than a little odd that a movie about making “Breathless” would be tucked in there with so many deliberately forgettable titles, just one more to scroll past. But there is something tantalizing about it too. “Weekend” and “Vivre sa vie” were not the first Godard movies I saw, but they were also some of the first times I remember really wondering of movies, “Ok, what is this?” I like imagining unsuspecting people having their curiosity sparked by “Nouvelle Vague,” investigating the movement’s back catalogue and even being inspired to gather some friends and go make something of their own. And that is why Linklater might not have intended this as a love letter so much as a message in a bottle. 

Last Flag Flying

Richard Linklater’s “Last Flag Flying” is a sorta-sequel to Hal Ashby’s “The Last Detail” (1973), each one based on a Daryl Ponsican book, and if the characters in Linklater’s film have different names and situations they are nevertheless spiritual kin, though obviously much older given time’s passage, and “Last Flag Flying”, for better, for worse, feels that age. Not just in their excursion to get cellphones, a comical contrast to the more off-color side trips that Ashby rendered, but how Ashby’s characters were prone more to reckless whims of the moment, if often dissatisfied with the present, while Linklater’s characters are more concerned with matters of the past. “Last Flag Flying”, after all, is set in 2003, employing the Iraq invasion as a means to retroactively consider the emotional quagmire of war. And if “The Last Detail” ended not simply by forgoing any Grand Lessons but sort of coldly chuckling at thought that any might exist, “Last Flag Flying” takes a more positive approach even as it mostly sidesteps sentimentality.

“Last Flag Flying” concerns Larry Shepherd (Steve Carell) enlisting his ex-military buddies, Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston) and Richard Mueller (Laurence Fishburne), to help him bury his marine son, Larry Jr., who just died a hero in the Middle East, at Arlington. Alas, upon learning the military’s story of how Larry Jr. perished is fictive, Larry Sr. and his pals, in the company of Lance Corporal Charlie Washington (J. Quinton Johnson), forgo the national military cemetery to take Larry Jr. home to New Hampshire and bury him in civilian clothes. It’s a road movie, in other words, like its forefather, though Linklater’s confection is less nasty and satirical than “The Last Detail”, which underlined its off-color action jaunty military-themed tunes, like “American Patrol”, whereas “Last Flag Flying’s” soundtrack, composed by Graham Reynolds, is more conventionally heartfelt.

Sometimes you worry that conventionality will sink the film. Indeed, it opens with Larry Sr. re-introducing himself to Sal at the empty bar the latter owns. That the night devolves into them tying one on, and that the morning begins by Sal drinking stale beer and eating leftover pizza, felt so obvious I could only roll my eyes, and even if I did not know from previews that their mutual other Mueller the Mauler, was a preacher, I would have strongly suspected it anyway, because if characters are a hungover on a Sunday morning where else can they wind up but a church? And by the time Mueller is looking Sal up and down with admonishments of “Lord have mercy”, “Last Flag Flying” threatens Mitch Albom-ish molasses. Thankfully, however, once the characters hit the road, the movie settles into an episodic yet laid-back groove, more devoted to meaningful conversation than antics, and repeatedly diffusing the narrative bombs that seem set to go off, like meeting the mother of their old Vietnam pal in which possible conflict gives way to the harsh truth that sometimes telling a lie is the best policy.

The movie’s refusal to make a scene, however, doesn’t quite extend to Cranston’s performance, riffing too hard on Jack Nicholson’s ribald “Last Detail” ringleader. (In one shot, seen from a distance, of Cranston in a black jacket and stocking cap, a cigar in hand, he almost looks like Nicholson). But if Nicholson was willing to let himself be the butt of the joke, Cranston plays the part as if he already knows the joke and wants to laugh along with us, exerting too much Life of the Party effort. Better is Fishburne, never becoming an overbearing clerical scold even as he exudes a genuine, hard-won faith, while Carell dials up his wallflower tendencies in some movies to fine effect.

If Sal and Mueller get predominantly more dialogue than Larry Sr., Linklater makes sure we never forget him, keeping him in shots when the other two verbally spar, staring out the window or listening intently. If the Larry of “The Last Detail” was impressionable, so is Larry of “Last Flag Flying”, and is why Sal becomes a variation of Walter Sobchak to The Dude in “The Big Lebowski”, kind of pushing Larry Sr. forward with each less-than-traditional decision, made believable because Larry Sr. wants to do right by his son and isn’t quite sure he’s up to the task. And though the ending seems primed for a dramatic face-off over whether or not to bury Larry Jr. in his uniform, this possible clash delicately, smartly evaporates, while a concluding twist that could have played as irksome narrative predestination instead comes across like a father finding peace and the perfect thematic punctuation. A soldier’s story belongs to him or her, not me, not you, and not anyone else.

Everybody Wants Some!!

As “Everybody Wants Some!!” opens, it is 1980, three days and a few hours until the start of college classes at fictional Southeast Texas State University, and eighteen year old freshman Jake (Blake Jenner) rolls up in his Oldsmobile to the derelict two story house he will be share with innumerable other members of the university’s baseball team. Once inside, he finds a garden hose conspicuously running along the floor and up the stairs and into a bedroom where a waterbed threatens to collapse the entire second floor while a few future teammates forgo introductions to simply dress this freshman down. And for a moment, you can see it – you can see the seed being planted for some payoff down the road where the second floor does give way, and where Jake is subjected to all sorts of faux-funny hazing rituals, as if we are on the verge of finding out what “Revenge of the Nerds” might’ve looked like had it taken place exclusively inside the domicile of the Alpha Betas. But if “Everybody Wants Some!!” doesn’t take the higher road, per se, it opts for an alternate route. Later, one of Jake’s teammates employs the phrase “tangents within the framework”, and though he’s describing a favorite record, he might as well be describing the movie itself. Writer/director Richard Linklater’s framework might be constructed from familiar parts, but his tangents within come equipped with so much surreptitious wit.

This isn’t to say that boys will not be boys; these boys are definitely boys, drinking, smoking and busting balls. Oh God, all the ball-busting; this movie’s foremost language is ball-busting, where you either give as good as you get it or start perusing the classifieds for individual housing, and even if it makes you wince, it’s never fake. Linklater simply air drops us into this environment, content to observe rather than aggressively advance a narrative, even as the incomparable Sandra Adair’s editing keeps the proceedings just focused enough. It’s as if the dream once harbored by another Linklater character, “Before Sunrise’s” Jesse Wallace, to create a National Geographic special for people, has sprung to life.

It’s a milieu of machismo, testosterone and, given their identities as baseball players, competitive zealotry, where even a game of Nerf basketball turns fierce, one guy boxing out another guy like it’s Game 7. Occasionally, genuine menace fills the air, such as when Jake finds two housemates in his room, going through his stuff, taking his clothes and a record, a masculine postulating of top dog. Yet, this moment just as quickly dissolves, as all the trash talk does. “We all take turns being the chump around here,” it is explained to Jake. “You just have to accept your chumpification and pass it on,” which is just about the most strikingly accurate bit of frat philosophizing ever put on film.

That viewpoint is tendered by Finnegan, or Finn, if you’d like, played by Glen Powell with an impeccable moustache and an affable charisma, faultlessly conveying a half-enlightenment that only a college upperclassman can possess, espousing b.s. and pearls of wisdom in equal measure. Finn cycles through clothes and affectations, and when Jake runs into a kid he used to know who has gone punk, it is Finn who is most gung-ho about going punk too, changing into a sleeveless shirt and moshing, at least for a few hours. It’s superficial, sure, but in that superficiality is something true, just another college kid trying on a different mask to see how this one fits, which emblemizes so much of “Everybody Wants Some!!” If the team’s home is one ecosystem, they seek out others by way of bars, dance clubs and house parties, not to infiltrate and make a ruckus (though that sometimes happens), but to see what this collegiate subculture is all about.

Finn also fancies himself a ladies’ man, as all these would-be gentleman callers do, which is where the film’s title comes from, one that nods, exclamations point and all, to a Van Halen song not shy about declaring how everybody wants some and, oh yeah, all these guys want some too. Indeed, if this is a National Geographic special for people then a good chunk is devoted to the mating ritual, and it impressively, astutely captures the overwhelming hormonal surge men of this particular age without crossing the line into leering lewdness.

Females mostly go without a voice, only to strategically change as the film winds toward its conclusion, when Jake meets Beverly (Zoey Deutch), a fine arts major appearing at first blush to have nothing in common with her ball-hurling suitor. But that’s the thing, the further the movie progresses the more Jake quietly changes, jettisoning a few of his more adolescent urges for something at least nodding in the direction of potentially burgeoning maturity. He’s intrigued by her, and her by him, which is to say that Linklater gives her a voice, a real voice, even if it’s likely steeped in the lore of the Joni Mitchell poster on her apartment wall because she herself is trying out affectations. When Jake brings along his entire team for a theater party she’s hosting, it’s another moment where another film would have stepped all wrong, but “Everybody Wants Some!!” stays true, where it’s not an attempt to impose your own set of misguided values onto someone else’s but to hear theirs out, a refreshing concept in an ever devolving American cinematic universe of stupidity and closed-mindedness.

And really, that curiosity is as close as the movie ever gets to any kind of epiphany, because this is not peaks and valleys with a triumphant summiting for a conclusion; it’s a lazy river, like the one Jake and Beverly swim in just a few hours before class starts, winding toward some destination that’s still a long, long way off.

Friday's (Not So) Old Fashioned: The School of Rock (2003)

In writing about the tenth anniversary of Richard Linklater’s “The School of Rock” for Esquire, Michael Hoinski referred to a specific scene, the one in which Dewey Finn (Jack Black), an aspiring hard rock axeman masquerading as a private school teacher acts out the theoretical live performance of his own composition, “Legend of the Rent” (“when the legend of the rent comes due”), to his musically-gifted students whom he's yearning to enlist in a brand new band. Hoinski explains that “Linklater wanted to shoot the scene just once: one shot, with a slow pull-out. Black was nervous, self-conscious. He wanted to break it down, do some close-ups, capture multiple angles — just in case he beefed it. But Linklater was steadfast. He envisioned the scene as a centerpiece. It ended up one of Black's favorite moments.” It speaks wholly to the idea of live music, one that is not created in a studio with extra takes and overlays, but a spontaneous eruption of the soul.

The transformative power of music never ceases to amaze me. A couple weeks ago I had plans to go see a show but it was across town at my least favorite music venue in the city and it was, like, four degrees outside and I had to wait for a bus – and wait, and wait, and wait – and the show didn’t start ‘til 9 even though it was a school night and I’m old and yada yada, more whining, etc. Then, the show began. And there but for the grace of Nikki Lane’s twang went I. Shivering in the cold before and only getting a few hours of sleep with a slight whiskey hangover after? Fughetaboutit. The concert, like so many concerts I've attended in my time, altered my mood, and allowed me communion with that beautiful place – the ever present now.

Richard Linklater has always been a filmmaker interested in music. More than that, though, he has been interested in how music relates to time. In his seminal “Dazed and Confused” he memorably marks the end of the Moon Tower party with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Tuesday’s Gone”, a song, not coincidentally, about moving on. In his astonishing “Before Sunrise” he plants our darling Jesse and Celine in a listening booth with Kath Bloom's “Come Here” and then doesn’t cut, lingering on them stealing looks of one another, music momentarily freezing time. In last year’s “Boyhood”, a movie made and set over the course of twelve years, he employs pop songs as a means to both convey the passage of time and transport us to a particular place, the nifty trick that music itself is always able to manage. But never was music was more integral than in “The School of Rock”, his 2003 family comedy semi-musical in which drifting misfit Dewey Finn, needing to make quick cash, takes the place of his academically inclined pal who's been asked to substitute at a prestigious school only to instead find himself transforming the children in his charge into a rock ‘n’ roll super group.

At first blush “The School of Rock” and “Boyhood” may not have a lot in common, but what they share most precisely is a conventionality of form. Yes, the latter was filmed over 12 years, but its narrative is completely linear, one touching on many of the more unremarkable moments of a child’s rearing, snapshots, like moving photos from the family album that a stranger doesn’t want to see and yet, somehow, is drawn into anyway. It is virtually resistant to the set-in-stone McKee-ish screenwriting principle of Dramatic Conflict. Consider the sequence, mentioned by many, where Mason Jr. and his pals are messing around with a circular saw blade. McKee would demand that blade “pay off” in some way. Linklater leaves it alone, which is the payoff. Yet it also adheres to a McKee screenwriting rule, the one that goes “Every scene is a story event”, it just doesn’t adhere in the way McKee necessarily intends.

You could, as many have, dub the plethora of scenes as mere “ennui”, and you would not be wrong, yet that two-and-a-half hours of “ennui” subtly add up to something whole. Not something concrete, per se, not a resolution so much as a realization. “It’s like,” says Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) sitting with his brand new lady friend at film's end, “it’s always right now.” It comes across simplistic, sure, because, duh, of course it’s always, like, right now. But so what? If it's so simple, why does no one appreciate it? Why does no one grasp it? It’s taken him the entire film to realize it and makes him, and us, go back every other event in the film where “nothing’s happening” to appreciate it for the way in which each and every one is always right now, and how it just slipped on by, undetected, like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing, to quote some dude.

Not only is “School of Rock’s” form conventional, so is its execution. As a teacher, Dewey enlightens his mighty-mite protégés to real rock history and teaches them to play their instruments with a flair becoming Keith & Ronnie to win The Battle of the Bands, but with Dewey pretending to be someone else, he is always in danger of being exposed. That exposure, of course, arrives like clockwork, forcing him to leave school in shame, ruining their shot at music-making glory. The kids, as they must, bust out of class to “kidnap” their favorite fool, Dewey, and make it to the gig late but still on time, just like a true rock band, while their parents and principal and give chase.

Formulaic as it comes, right? Yet the screenplay, which was written by Mike White, is doing some incredibly deft things. It uses these rote reversals to intrinsically embody the rebellious spirit of rock ‘n’ roll. Even better, rather than having than turning it into a showdown of Parents & Principal vs. Dewey & The Kids, it lets all the conflict fall away once the concert commences. Everyone looks up, shuts up, and simply gives themselves over to the ministry of rock ‘n’ roll. In other words, they realize “it’s like, it’s always right now”. The movie ends in the middle of the encore, which is apropos because that's the ultimate dream of every magnificent concert - to extinguish suffering and desire and consciousness and just be.

“Time,” wrote Indian philosopher Jidda Krishnamurti “is transcended only in the stillness of the present.” That's the ineffable place magnificent live music takes us; that's the ineffable place Richard Linklater and his Richard Linklater-y protagonists are always striving to find, and sometimes, even if they don't realize it, they do.

Boyhood

Perhaps the most astonishing element of the astonishing “Boyhood”, a virtually unprecedented project in which director Richard Linklater filmed the same actors over a twelve year period in an effort to truly convey the rhythms and effects of an entire upbringing, is its utter conventionality. When such laudatory ambition is a film’s calling card, it typically signals an unheard of narrative slant or filmmaking innovation, but aside from a number of simply elegant frames intended to capture the fundamentally picturesque - like a sunset in Texas, or a camping trip pseudo-sing along – the visual style is unshowy, and the narrative is almost aggressively formulaic. Yet without saying much new at all, “Boyhood” manages to convey an enlightening cinematic experience that feels entirely original. 

The film essentially opens with our protagonist of the title, Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane), laying in the grass in his native Texas, staring up at the sky, his head, as he is quickly told afterwards, in the clouds. It is a poetical opening perfectly juxtaposing with the weight of quietly crushing reality to follow. He and his sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater, the auteur’s daughter), a few years older, are the children of a struggling single mother (Patricia Arquette), who returns to school to carve out a better future and gets involved with a string of men whose quality seems beneath her true-to-life nobility. Their father, Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), is requisitely absentee, beginning in Alaska (is that where all confused men flee?) and returning home to be with his kids, but without necessarily wanting responsibility's weight. This traditionally untraditional family’s ups and downs and middles are then chronicled, with little to no surprise. But surprises are not the point. “Boyhood”, observational without becoming a docudrama, is about existence. Not existence as in “why are we here?”, though that question is addressed with its own sort of everyman philosophy, but in existing, in how our lives are marked by the passage of time.

By its very nature, “Boyhood” is episodic. Beginning in the past – 2002 to be precise – and then moving forward, the film functions as a time capsule – indulging in the dated sites of oversized tabletop computers and Harry Potter book signings. Yet in spite of these elements and many others, the film resists an annoying overt and jokey insistence on them. They merely are. When Mason Sr. later in the film laments he learns about his kids’ life on Facebook, it’s incredible how natural it feels. At one point in time, it isn't; then, it is.

But by its very nature the film also requires time-jumping, not just in years but in months and days, and it yields one of the film's few flaws as crucial texture necessary for arc and characterization is jettisoned. In particular, Arquette’s post-Mason Sr. spouses both devolve into alcoholics, the first a monster and the second more inwardly enraged. These tangents wreak of cliché (and the Oscar-nominated French short from last year, “Just Before Losing Everything”, is a more affecting dramatization of a family fleeing an abusive spouse) but it’s difficult to gauge the characters’ precise metamorphoses into drunken louts when the majority of these transformations are required on account of running time to happen off screen. Then again, that lack of specifics – or, more appropriately, the loss of those specifics, is unwittingly a strength. So many specifics get lost in the accumulating dust of years gone by, and if the kids and their mother remember the alcoholic outbursts, maybe they don’t quite remember what brought them about.

Ellar Coltrane was six when filming started and eighteen when it ended, mirroring his role, and so we actually see Coltrane – er, Mason Jr. – navigate the pitfalls of going through puberty on camera. His youthful long hair is chopped away (reluctantly) for a buzz cut and then grown back out. He changes his style, his clothes, his attitude. His voice registers different octaves. And it’s not just Coltrane. It’s Linklater. “When you go through all of those awkward things that happen to us in adolescence and post-adolescence,” the singer/songwriter Jenny Lewis recently said in an interview, “to experience that in front of the camera and in front of other people is really uncomfortable.” And here are Coltrane and Linklater, having those experiences in front of the camera and in front of us. And it’s not just them. It’s Patricia Arquette, and her willingness to let her physical shifts be documented is the epitome of that word which is “supposed” to be avoided in film reviews at all costs – namely, brave. It’s brave because this is Hollywood and in Hollywood even the slightest sign of an actress aging can find her unceremoniously dumped into the “Not” column of a hideous “Hot or Not?” list.

And the though the film's title is “Boyhood”, the subtitle may well be Parenthood, because Linklater explores the maturation process not merely for children but for adults. Arquette’s mom struggles with insecurity even as she experiences professional success, and Hawke’s dad becomes a singular illustration of a life as a work in progress. Hawke, in fact, sneakily gives the best performance in the film, and one of the best performances I can recall of a semi-deadbeat dad, a man-child, to use the parlance of our movie times, but obliterating the archetype in the process, breaking off into something wholly authentic. It is subtly layered, deceptively complex, a man growing by feet and inches rather than leaps and bounds, but the change he makes by the end is real, and it is made all the more affecting because the actor conveys how difficult it was to come by and how far he still has to go – how far we (you, me, all of us) have to go.

“Boyhood” runs for two hours and forty-four minutes, a seeming eternity when it starts, gone in the blink of an eye when it ends. It would appear to demand re-visitation, yet part of me feels that to re-visit it would compromise the film's very spirit for we merely re-visit the past in our mind. What’s gone is gone. We shed our skins. We forge ahead.