Everybody Wants Some

Film (2016)
Written and directed by Richard Linklater

With Blake Jenner (Jake), Juston Street (Jay), Tyler Hoechlin (McReynolds), Glen Powell (Finnegan), Temple Baker (Plummer), Forrest Vickery (Coma), J. Quinton Johnson (Dale), Zoey Deutch (Beverly)

Jake (Blake Jenner), a ninth-grade pitcher in the 1970s in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), is now off to college in the 1980s as a freshman. While primarily physically brutalized in high school by upperclassmen, the tale of Dazed and Confused, freshman Jake now has to deal with more complex forms of sadism, egotism and defensiveness from his upperclassmen colleagues on the college baseball team. Nonetheless, Jake is a self-possessed and charming young man, and manages to catch the attentions of an equally charming and self-possessed young woman, Beverly (Zoey Deutch), while gradually learning how to contend with the blustering but fragile egos of his teammates.

Richard Linklater, the celebrated American director, most recently of the masterful Boyhood (2014), seems to get into cinematic schticks. He did this in spades with the series of films that followed a couple talking, endlessly but endearingly, around town and over the decades. Starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, the series of films which comprises this saga – Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), Before Midnight (2013) – constitutes a unique epic.

As well, Boyhood (2014), filmed over the course of twelve years, is a masterpiece, exhibiting Linklater’s determination to be not only highly individualistic but dedicated to enduring projects with totally unique approaches.

Others of his films are more plainly crowd-pleasers and somewhat more ordinary in their approaches, while still retaining a kind of directorial dignity.

Dazed and Confused (1993) and its current sequel Everybody Wants Some fall into this category. They are both, in some ways, very ordinary films about a bunch of guys in school. Though they have their intrigues and charms, and though there’s something angled enough about the perspective in both that gives a clue that a sophisticated directorial mind is behind it, they are not really bold and unique forays into the creative filmmaking universe in the way that the Before… series and Boyhood are.

In some ways, the portrayal of the cruelties of high school hazing rituals in Dazed and Confused gives a fairly clear sense of the odd but acute perspective from which the current film takes off. The amused stance from which that film regards the torment of high school freshmen by the upper class people prevails throughout. The title also gives a clear sense of what the film is up to – that this is not an ordinary let’s have fun a la Fast Times at Ridgemont High high school film, but a rather focused view of the cruelties of the practices that adolescents impose on one another.

In the current film, the title does not give as clear a clue to the film’s perspective. It’s not so clear what everybody wants in Everybody Wants Some, though one might well assume it means either sex, or time in the spotlight of success, or both. One might speculatively generalize and say that what each member of this gang of elder adolescents wants is a kind of nurturing of their blossoming egos in whatever context that demands.

The setting is a college baseball team onto which the freshman protagonist now lands. As in the earlier film, upperclassmen impose their idiotic egos right and left. How clueless and ridiculous they all appear is what gives this film some heft. The Fellini-esque portrayals of some of the wackos on the team are priceless.

On the other hand, this film is a much more ordinary kind of entertainment than any of the Before… series. One might well watch it and think it’s something like Animal House (1978) – a frat film with a lot of weirdos and considerable laughs – and be none the wiser about the auteur who has produced it.

Linklater seems to be a devotee of genre, and has created his own to house his several categories of narratives. In this one, the tale is quite simple and straightforward in some ways, but understanding its thematic commitment to the historical programme started with Dazed and Confused helps to frame it and bestow more intrigue upon it.

In some ways Linklater shows notable similarities to the other American auteur of his generation, Wes Anderson, in the desire to create a cinema more than casually inspired by his childhood. Both resemble Truffaut, and to some extent, Fellini, in this regard. Linklater, interestingly, is a cinematic poet who sometimes speaks in lyrics and sometimes in prose. The Before… series and Boyhood are clearly cinematic poems, almost shocking in their uniqueness. Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some are more prosaic, but knowing that the poet has created them allows one to listen for the subtle touches that give the sense, at times, that an auteur is at work here as well.

– BADMan