Dazed and Confused

Director Richard Linklater (right) on the set of the film

 

DAZED AND CONFUSED             B+              
USA  (103 mi)  1993  d:  Richard Linklater

You know, the ‘68 Democratic convention was probably the most bitchin’ time I ever had in my life.  Hey guys, one more thing:  This summer, when you’re being inundated by all the American bicentennial Fourth of July brouhaha, don’t forget what you’re celebrating, and that’s the fact that a bunch of slave-owning aristocratic white males didn’t want to pay their taxes. 

—Ms. Stroud, teacher (Kim Krizan)

All I’m saying is that if I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself. 

—Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London)

Linklater’s first successful film SLACKER (1991), an unconventional narrative made on a budget of just $23,000, along with Soderbergh’s earlier SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE (1989), made for just over $1 million dollars, helped usher in a new era of low budget, independent filmmaking of the 1990’s, opening the doors for other newcomers like Kevin Smith who was able to make CLERKS (1994) for $230,000, but also Quintin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) or Larry Clark’s KIDS (1995), altering the concept of what it costs to make good films.  A decade later Soderbergh had a similar effect by going digital, redefining the filmmaking process by significantly lowering the expenses, in effect, permanently altering the look of films today.  Much like his predecessor, DAZED AND CONFUSED represents another near plotless film that takes place in less than 24 hours on what is essentially the last day of high school on May 26, 1976, using a slew of undiscovered or non-professional actors on a free-wheeling, multi-layered expedition throughout the day and night looking for something to do.  Reflective of small town values in the heartland of Texas, kids will go to any extremes to avoid boredom, the common denominator in just about every kid’s life at this age, turning it into a hilarious road movie of sorts, using a potent, electrically charged rock ‘n’ roll soundtrack that to some may sound like heavy metal shitkicker music, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, etc, bands that shortly afterwards went into a sharp decline from their decadent, drug-tinged road activities, where the excess was a prelude to punk, though War and Dr. John are the only featured bands that are not all-white, as there’s an absence of R & B or soul music that otherwise dominated the times in urban cities, like Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, Earth, Wind, & Fire, or Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes.  But that’s a whole other story, as the only black kid featured in the cast is Melvin (Jason O. Smith), a guy seen playing craps in the hallways that also plays football and hangs with a white crowd.   

Shot in Austin, Texas, the film is one of the few that actually provides a window into the way its residents live, especially those living on the economic margins feeling an apathy or cultural disconnectedness from mainstream society.  With a rich mix of characters, and choice dialogue, the film takes a rather absurdist glimpse into the social rituals of high school, especially the existing power dynamic that pits upper class seniors against lowly freshmen, two groups that in many other parts of the country simply ignore one another, as freshmen would never be worth the time of day to many seniors.  But here, seniors get a chance to prey on a weaker species, using an age-old hazing tradition to pounce on young freshmen, chasing them down in cars, singling them out for sadistic thrashings, attacking in organized groups, using wooden paddles to whack their backsides, where freshmen are expected to take their medicine as a rite of passage.   While the freshmen view it as an idiotic ritual, the seniors feel as if it’s their just rewards for finishing high school, as they’re finally liberated from spending untold numbers of hours in wretchedly boring classes with teachers they simply had no interest in, where most of the time it felt like drudgery.  On this final day of school many seniors aren’t even in the classrooms, yet they’re wandering the halls at will discussing what they’re going to do this summer.  Free of the 50’s nostalgia of AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973), the film uses a similar structure, bringing together a large gathering of kids in search of a party, spending most of the time following groups in cars or walking down the street, meeting at local hang-outs, like burger joints, drive-ins, pool halls, bars and liquor stores, all the while listening to blaring music coming out of the car radios.  While it reverts back to simpler times, the film could almost be described as an anthem to drunk driving, as it shows little regard for the hazards of driving while stoned or intoxicated, where this kind of behavior is deemed as just another one of the male rite of passages.  Most of the time, however, nothing is happening, with no plots, or even subplots, as instead they drive around aimlessly and congregate in small groups waiting for something to happen, where they’ll drink beer, smoke a joint, and hope they run into someone who can tell them where a party is. 

Opening with a slow-motion shot of an orange muscle car pulling into a high school parking lot to the sounds of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” Aerosmith - Sweet Emotion - YouTube (4:40), the idea of cruising sets the film in motion, with Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” Alice Cooper - School's Out - YouTube (4:33) igniting a mad rush of freedom, leaving behind the empty hallways and lockers that are suddenly turned into dead zones.  With boy seniors spreading out in all directions searching for incoming freshmen to flog, we witness the particularly obnoxious and domineering behavior of the senior girls, none more authoritarian than Parker Posey as Darla, ordering the incoming freshmen girls to the ground in the school parking lot where they can be covered with ketchup, mustard, flour, and raw eggs, with some forced to propose to senior boys.  While it all unravels in a confusing and haphazard manner, with a host of characters continually entering and exiting the screen, two characters initially stand out, Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London), the star quarterback who will be back for another year, who basically plays football in order to get laid, ordered to sign a pledge prohibiting the use of alcohol or drugs over the summer, which all the other players apparently signed, but not Pink, so he continually gets berated by his football coach.  The other is a mirror version in the younger Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), an 8th grade star pitcher who wonders with his friends what high school life will be like, dreaming of high school girls “putting out,” where he is singled out by the seniors for paddling after his sister tells the boys to go easy on him, where the worst of the offenders is Ben Affleck as O’Bannion, a pathetic figure of a dimwitted senior that had to repeat his senior year.  After they lay in wait for Mitch after a game, running him through the ringer, Pink gives him a ride afterwards, feeling sympathetic, inviting him to a party afterwards where one of his friend’s parents are expected to leave for a vacation.  But when a beer keg arrives before they leave, his parents grow overly suspicious, changing their plans, which seemingly alters the plans of every kid in town, as the party will have to be relocated.  Kids just drive around, cruising aimlessly, until finding out the new destination.  Reportedly one-sixth of the film’s budget was spent on acquiring the rights to the array of 70’s musical songs, where the word “man” is said 203 times in the film, while the word “fuck” is used 59 times.

The notable pothead is Rory Cochrane as Ron Slater, an easygoing, likable guy who is lit up throughout the film, who is willing to do just about anything so long as weed is present, who goes on a few crazed philosophical tangents, while a Woodward and Bernstein duo of intellectuals, Adam Goldberg as Mike and Anthony Rapp as Tony, over-analyze just about everything, usually accompanied by the redhead Cynthia (Marissa Ribisi, married a decade later to American musician Beck), who inquisitively asks, “Which one of you had the theory about how president Ford’s old football head injuries is affecting the economy?”  After deciding on the need for more alcohol, while swigging beer in the backseat, Mike decides he doesn’t want to go to law school anymore, coming up with one of the memorable lines of the film when he confesses abruptly, “I wanna dance!”  Matthew McConaughey as Wooderson is the older master of ceremonies, the ultimate party animal who coined the phrase “all right, all right, all right” in this film, a phrase he has used throughout his career, even at the Academy Awards, making it sound downright sleazy, a guy who trolls high school years after he’s done with it still searching for young girls, “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man.  I get older, they stay the same age.”  Standing in front of the Emporium, a local pool hall and arcade for teenagers that is a central meeting point, kids simply coalesce while drinking beer and listening to music, including Mitch, who is welcomed by an older crowd, drinking beer and smoking marijuana for the first time, where they go on a drunken neighborhood spree destroying mailboxes.  To the sounds of Nazareth - Love Hurts - YouTube (3:36), there are also inevitable boy/girl link-ups, where Mitch gravitates to a sophomore girl Julie (Catherine Morris), Tony becomes linked with an attractive incoming freshman girl Sabrina  (Christin Hinojosa), seen earlier getting humiliated by Darla, while Wooderson has a thing for redheads, exchanging phone numbers with none other than Cynthia, much to the surprise of Woodward and Bernstein, as she’s the smartest and most literate girl around.  Running into his middle school friends at the Emporium afterwards, they come up with a plan to get revenge on O’Bannion, subjecting him to his own paint smear, dumping a can of paint all over him, leaving him not only surprised, but embarrassed and utterly humiliated.  It’s the type of prank that perfectly mirrors the same type of adolescent humor found in AMERICAN GRAFITTI. 

Once the Emporium closes, the mythical keg party finally materializes on the outskirts of town outdoors in a park area under a Moon Tower, which, of course, kids climb up for a sense of daring adventure.  With a feeling of reckless abandon, heightened by a clever musical soundtrack that includes the funky swamp music of Dr. John, Dr. John - Right Place Wrong Time - YouTube (2:54), kids finally have something to celebrate with an anything goes kind of beer bust, where drugs of all nature instantly appear, as kids literally spill onto the screen into a stream-of-conscious mosaic of drug chatter and drunken machismo, where sloppy drunks inadvertently fall to the ground in hysterics and psychedelic flower children sing spacey songs, like Milla Jovovich as Michelle plunking her acoustic guitar while gazing at the stars singing “The Alien Song,” MILLA JOVOVICH-"The Alien Song (For Those Who Listen)" LIVE ... YouTube (4:27).  While the party sequence is broken down into several haphazard moments, Cynthia spouts philosophic about her every other decade theory, “The fifties were boring.  The sixties rocked.  And the seventies—oh my God, they obviously suck.  Come on!  Maybe the eighties will be radical,” Mitch Kramer is seen wandering aimlessly through the crowd, eventually hooking up with Julie, before being called a little Casanova by the seniors, actually a bit envious at the little man’s smooth prowess with the ladies.  The two are seen making out under the stars later that night, while Mike (“I feel like I’m being stalked by a Nazi.”) goes all ape-shit over an obnoxious taunt, deciding he’s Mike Tyson for an instant, getting in a single punch before being pummeled by a drunken redneck.  Once the beer runs out, Tony drives Sabrina home, giving her a sweet kiss good night, while Pink and the football gang decides to relive old times smoking a joint on the 50-yard line.  Of course, they are interrupted by security, handed over to the coach, who berates Pink for hanging out with a bunch of losers, reminding him of his priorities to the team.  Pink gracefully exits back to his comrades in crime, crumples up the pledge and tells the coach he might play football next year, but his top priority of the summer is actually getting Aerosmith tickets with his loser friends.  With the dawn already upon them, Mitch returns home only to find his mother still waiting up for him, but despite the smell of alcohol she decides to be lenient this time as he falls into his bed, with thoughts of everything that happened still swirling around his head, putting on headphones playing Slow Ride- Foghat (Full Version) - YouTube (8:16), while the football gang of stoners decide to head up the road and buy the Aerosmith tickets while they can, where their future is an open book of blank as yet unwritten pages. 

Mud

MUD               A-                   

USA  (130 mi)  2012  d:  Jeff Nichols 

In Huckleberry Finn I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was. He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had. His liberties were totally unrestricted. He was the only really independent person—boy or man—in the community, and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy and envied by the rest of us. And as his society was forbidden us by our parents the prohibition trebled and quadrupled its value, and therefore we sought and got more of his society than any other boy’s.

—from Mark Twain’s Autobiography, initially published in 1924, his description of childhood friend Tom Blankenship, used as the inspiration for the character Huck Finn, the real-life son of a sawmill laborer and sometime drunkard named Woodson Blankenship, who lived in a “ramshackle” house near the Mississippi River behind the house where Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri

Jeff Nichols has become what we all hoped indie director David Gordon Green would become before he developed a taste for making mainstream movies, a fiercely independent artist firmly rooted into the rural American soil of his films, finding unconventional stories through people living on the edge.  Like Green, Nichols is also a graduate of the North Carolina School of the Arts, where much of this resembles the Southern Gothic look of the dilapidated rural poor in Green’s UNDERTOW (2004), which happened to be produced by Terrence Malick, filming his first and third films in his home state of Arkansas while also sharing Green’s musical composer, David Wingo, with a healthy dose of the alternative country band Lucero thrown in, as the front man of the group, Ben Nichols, is the director’s brother.  Nichols also borrows the youngest brother, Tye Sheridan, from Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), who is nothing short of brilliant in the lead role of only his second film, while also using Malick’s producer, Sarah Green.  Sheridan will, interestingly enough, be working with David Gordon Green, and also Nicolas Cage playing an ex-con (yes, it's a stretch), in his next film Joe (2013). The other major influence on the film is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, especially the use of the river, both as a mystical symbol of freedom, but it also provides a colorful setting in this small Arkansas town, a portrait of reality in the everyday lives of people trying to make a living off of it.  From the outset, the river, as in Huckleberry Finn, is fraught with danger, but also adventure, where two best friend 14-year old boys, Tye as Ellis and Jacob Lofland as Neckbone, live with their families working the river and spend their free time on Ellis’s boat exploring the nearby tributaries of the Mississippi River, never actually venturing to the Mississippi itself, seen looming ominously off in the distance. 

While exploring a seemingly deserted island, they discover a house boat stuck in the upper branches of a tree, as if left there by a flood.  Inside the boat, they discover pornographic magazines, but also a current food supply, suggesting someone’s already living there.  Running back to their boat, they find a filthy, ragged looking man standing beside it fishing, introducing himself as Mud (Matthew McConaughey) in a friendly and non-threatening manner, telling them he’s there waiting on the island for someone.  The more they learn about this guy, the more curious Ellis grows, like an unraveling adventure story, as his own life is a mess, with his parents splitting up and getting a divorce, where afterwards the government will likely take their family’s boathouse on the river, while Neckbone, who lives with his uncle (Michael Shannon), is more suspicious.  To them, Mud is an enigma, a man seemingly living by his wits out in the wild that needs some help, claiming he’s trying to reunite with his lost love, the girl of his dreams, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon).  Mud asks the boys to help bring him food and supplies, claiming he needs to fix up the boat to make their getaway, but if they help, he’ll give Neckbone the gun he keeps tucked into the back of his pants.  Even after finding out Mud killed a man that was physically abusing Juniper, tracking him down in the state of Texas and shooting him, where he’s now an outlaw and a wanted man, this notion of manly protection and true love captivates the imagination of Ellis, whose own home life is in turmoil, with his parents giving up on love and barely speaking, while at the same time he meets an older girl in town, May Pearl (Bonnie Sturdivant), quickly grabbing her attention when he sees her getting hassled on the street and punches a guy that was giving her trouble, a guy several years older.  Through Mud, Ellis identifies with the idea of a man standing up for love, and even fighting for it, if necessary.  

One of the better indie films seen in almost a year, though told fairly straightforwardly like a family drama, Nichols is an intelligent filmmaker with a beautifully poetic, naturalistic style, where all the performances are perfectly understated, especially Sheridan as Ellis, who couldn’t be more compelling, as he risks quite a bit for a man he barely knows, quickly entering a grown up world without really understanding how it works.  When he discovers Juniper is living in a motel near a local Piggly Wiggly grocery store, Mud has him deliver her a message, where the atmospheric mood of the film establishes the mindset and influences the action of the film, as Ellis rushes headlong into the developing fray, unaware of the traps being set by the family of the killed man, where Joe Don Baker, Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser in WALKING TALL (1973) and out of the public eye for years, is the creepy family patriarch.  At the same time, none other than Sam Shepard is the mysterious loner living across the river from Ellis, curiously enough named Tom Blankenship, Twain’s childhood friend, who helps create a clearer picture of Mud, as he’s the closest thing to being his father.  But knowing Juniper is in the picture, Tom senses little can become of it except more trouble, suggesting that’s the truth of the matter, that she finds one ornery bastard after another just so Mud will beat the living crap out of him, taking some peculiar satisfaction out of that while Mud ends up hiding out in the middle of nowhere with the wrath of God waiting for him.  It’s all too confounding for Ellis, who believes they really love each other, which is the reason he’s risking his neck for the guy, as otherwise all the love has dried up in his life, where even his own father (Ray McKinnon) urges him not to place his trust in it.  This is not your typical coming-of-age tale, where these two kids are wise beyond their years, shown with a rarely seen complexity and grace, but still Ellis’s child’s eye view appropriately mixes the confusion about adult relationships with his own painfully naïve experiences with girls, where the visual poetry of the film helps express the underlying desperation he feels in witnessing the only world he knows slowly disappear.  Nichols has become one of the most assured indie directors working today, where perhaps the Palme D’Or success at Cannes of Malick’s 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #1 The Tree of Life and Benh Zeitlin’s Sundance winner 2012 Top Ten List #1 Beasts of the Southern Wild have spurred a resurgence in American independent cinema, where even David Gordon Green may be attempting to return to his Southern Gothic roots.