The Essentials: Richard Linklater’s Best Films

“Before Sunset” (2004)
Indie romances aren’t usually prime targets for sequels, but Linklater and the stars of 1995’s “Before Sunrise” defied conventional wisdom to create the sublime “Before Sunset.” While most cinematic love stories end with the hook-up, the story’s continuation explores the aftermath of the one-night romance of Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) almost a decade later. The now-older-and-wiser pair spend an afternoon on the streets of Paris, rehashing their Vienna evening from nine years ago, and it’s the rare follow-up that doesn’t just step up its game, but also makes the original deeper and richer in retrospect. The interaction between Celine and Jesse is revealing and real (the moment when the pair share a cab, Delpy trying, unseen, to touch Hawke, but pulling back, is one of our favorite pieces of screen acting), and the intimate script earned Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke an Oscar nomination, and the eternal affection of true romantics who aren’t swayed by Hollywood’s unrealistic output. [A]

“The Bad News Bears” (2005)
“The Bad News Bears” was a direct response to Linklater’s success with “School of Rock,” but in many ways stands as the antithesis to that film. Whereas the Jack Black vehicle was grown organically from an original script by Mike White, “Bad News Bears” was a naked grab at a commercially viable hit based on a beloved, preexisting property, the 1976 Michael Ritchie/Walter Matthau comedy of the same name. While “School of Rock” had time in development to cater the characters to the kids that they had cast, “Bad News Bears” had a truncated schedule and as a result the child actors feel anonymous, the characters lacking depth and the snappy pacing of “School of Rock” was replaced with a lethargic, nearly two-hour-long running time. It’s enough to make you wonder why Linklater made it at all. It’s not completely devoid of laughs and Billy Bob Thornton riffs on his “Bad Santa” performance to a fairly entertaining degree (“Bad Santa” writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa wrote the script but it’s got whole swaths cut and pasted from Bill Lancaster’s screenplay from the original). It’s just that it’s the rare dud in Linkater’s oeuvre, even more damning since it was made at a time in his career when he was at his strongest both commercially (“School of Rock”) and critically (“Before Sunset”). We understand that you have to take the paycheck every once in a while, and maybe Linklater saw something interesting that he wanted to do with the project that just didn’t get translated to the screen, but for whatever reason, “Bad News Bears” might be the filmmaker’s most easily skippable movie. [D+]

“A Scanner Darkly” (2006)
It’s safe to say that the director’s second experiment with rotoscoping animation didn’t get a proper chance when it was released back in 2006. Faced with production delays, middling reviews, and a release date at the height of summer, the movie never found the cult audience it deserved, despite being a heir apparent to the stoner-approved “Waking Life.” Adapting Philip K. Dick‘s novel himself, Linklater takes the intensive, amusing dialogue sessions that are his custom and coats them in fresh paranoia, creating a bleak sci-fi tale with more than a fair share of noir tendencies. Keanu Reeves plays an undercover police detective set to monitor a supplier of Substance D, a highly addictive hallucinatory drug with a large part of the population at its beck and call. His double life involves living with addicts (played by the enormously fun Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr.) and prodding a self-described coke addict (Winona Ryder) who he assumes to be a highly connected dealer. The only problem? Reeves is now a junkie himself and the damage done to his brain makes it difficult to properly perceive reality or his own being. This leads the protagonist to become an untrustworthy narrator, though interestingly enough, it’s hard to really trust anyone in the film—the government workers who diagnose the condition seem highly manipulative and could very well be lying about everything—which only makes things thrillingly unpredictable. The rotoscope works particularly well for this one—things look and feel real, but there’s just something a tad artificial and suspicious about it. This aesthetic also lead to the “scramble suit,” a full-body disguise which frequently changes the wearer’s appearance every couple of seconds. This thing is a walking metaphor—the destruction of singular identity, the government’s watchdog obsession, take your pick—but is also, on a superficial level, incredibly disturbing. First time viewers may find that ‘Scanner’ is a lot to take in and some might get lost amidst the knotty plot, but given a second shot it’s a wild ride and a pretty unique view of those Big Brother horrors that sci-fi writers love to go on about. [A-]

“Fast Food Nation” (2006)
Whatever you were thinking a narrative feature based on Eric Schlosser‘s best-selling nonfiction book (Schlosser co-wrote the screenplay) might turn out to be, Linklater’s grim, weird, boldly political “Fast Food Nation,” a sort of cattle-mangling equivalent to “Traffic,” probably wasn’t it. A sprawling, Altman-esque tangle with a half-dozen intermingling plotlines, a vaguely sinister, conspiratorial tone, and a climax that features footage of a cow getting churned through a real-life slaughter house (shocking, for sure), it was too wild to be a real Oscar contender and not outwardly pleasurable enough to be pure entertainment. Instead, it was this lumpy, misshapen experiment that, while admirably ambitious, is hard to really love, despite its stellar cast (including, but not limited to, Greg Kinnear, Kris Kristofferson, Bruce Willis, Patricia Arquette, Paul Dano, Ethan Hawke, Avril Lavigne, Wilmer Valderrama and paranoid radio show host Alex Jones), solid direction and beautiful, plainspoken cinematography (by frequent collaborator Lee Daniel). Linklater and Schlosser made a bolder movie than anyone could have anticipated but it was also alienating to the point that it couldn’t get its message across. [C]