Richard Linklater (2016)

Richard Linklater’s latest takes its name and two exclamation marks from the title of a Van Halen song.  Linklater’s previous film Boyhood ended with the arrival of its young protagonist at college in Texas and this is the starting point of Everybody Wants Some!!   The two movies’ timeframes are very different, however:  Boyhood covers twelve years in Mason Evans Jr’s life; Everybody Wants Some!! less than three days – from the Thursday afternoon before the start of the new academic year to the following Monday morning, when classes begin.   The central character, Jake, is a hot-shot baseball pitcher on a sports scholarship.  The film – a comedy, which Linklater wrote as well as directed – describes Jake’s initiation into the (fictional) Southeast Texas Cherokees college baseball team, and how he and his housemates, a mixture of freshmen and sophomores, spend their first weekend together.

Everybody Wants Some!! is set in 1980 – around the same time that Richard Linklater was studying and playing baseball at Sam Houston State University – and he gives the story the glow of a golden age.  As the Before trilogy and Boyhood have already shown, Linklater can make movies about people and periods with which the sharpest film-critic sensibilities identify warmly, sentimentally and regretfully.  Everybody Wants Some!! repeats the trick, at least among Linklater’s near-contemporaries (he was born in 1960).  David Edelstein writes that: ‘What everybody wants in Everybody Wants Some!! is not just sex and success on the field. It’s what we all want. It’s time.’  For Stephanie Zacharek, the film ‘captures the essence of all sorts of youthful desires, both those that are easily identifiable and the more aching, unnameable kind’.   According to Anthony Lane, ‘the final shot of the film is not just funny and sleepy but touched with a melancholy truth, of which Jake and his companions are but dimly aware. For these young Americans, the past few days have been their waking life, cranked up to the max, and everything to come – the serious task of studying, graduating, and growing up – will be a dream’.

It’s to the credit of Ryan Gilbey, a generation younger than Edelstein, Zacharek and Lane but a big Before/Boyhood fan, is clear-eyed enough to observe that ‘Linklater is too besotted with his male creations to see that they can be divided almost without exception between the bland and the obnoxious’.  Watching a piece of unashamed nostalgia and finding the Eden on screen a hell on earth is a curious experience.  I kept feeling relief during Boyhood that I hadn’t had this kind of coming-of-age.  The more light-hearted Everybody Wants Some!! produced the same effect more intensely.  The frat-house hierarchies, rivalries and joshing are excruciating – all the more so because each baseballer has just one or two characteristics and the performances mostly feel overworked.  As Jake, the wholesome, toothy Blake Jenner isn’t interesting but at least manages to convey the sense of an intelligence taking in his new surroundings and the people in them.  Jake must be brainy because he wrote his college entrance essay on the relationship between baseball and the myth of Sisyphus – but, don’t worry, he’s all right really:  on the Monday morning, after a night before of partying and sex, he dozes off at his first lecture.

One of the plot twists involves a member of the team, named Willoughby, being unmasked as a thirty-year-old and getting sent down (probably not the Texan phrase for it).  He’s spent several years transferring from college to college so that he can carry on playing ball and enjoying student social and sex life.  The revelation of Willoughby’s true age doesn’t have much impact, though, because most of the late-teenage characters are incarnated by actors who look a decade older.  Willoughby is played by Wyatt Russell (the son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn), who’s now twenty-nine, but Glen Powell, Ryan Guzman and Tyler Hoechlin are among others who appear to be – and are – nearer thirty than twenty.  The team is such a motley collection that it even includes an African-American (J Quinton Johnson), although he also seems to be the only non-white on the whole campus.  Perhaps this is an historically accurate reflection of student ethnicity in Texan higher education in 1980.  If it is, though, that rather shadows the bliss-was-it-in-that-dawn-to-be-at-college flavour of the piece.  The girls in the film are mostly studying drama – a typical girly thing to do, whereas baseball … At least this polarisation makes for the script’s wittiest moment.  Beverly (Zoey Deutch), who’s in a relationship with Jake by the time the weekend’s done, asks him at what point in the college year the baseball team will start ‘rehearsals’.

On the Saturday evening Jake and the others gatecrash (that’s probably not the mot juste either) a punk party.  They’re meant to be incongruous there but the punks look out of place too:  the sequence summed up for me the phoniness of the movie as a whole.  But there’s no denying that Everybody Wants Some!!  has something for everybody.   The cast are evidently having fun.  Viewers wanting to reminisce nostalgically about their happy youth can impose their own real experience (or retrospective illusions) on the material.  Those eager to indict the sexual mores and racial exclusivity of the time and place Linklater is depicting will feel vindicated.  For anyone who feels they may have missed out on happiness as a result of lacking the various kinds of self-confidence on display here (physical, sexual, social, intellectual), the movie is a potent antidote to regret.

18 May 2016