Using the tools of filmmaking to recreate a real historical time and place has long been one of the primary storytelling functions of movies. As audience members, one of our great joys is getting lost in a detailed, immersive representation of a place that we could never truly access in real life. Richard Linklater is a director and writer whose projects have repeatedly drawn him to the past. Be it to his own childhood and young adulthood, or to any number of specific pockets of history that interest him creatively.
Across his career there have been more than a few examples of Linklater ostensibly using his movies, at least in part, to single-mindedly craft an audiovisual time capsule of a bygone time and place. Always utilizing his eye for cultural and historical detail, Linklater is one of the best at using his craft to resurrect the past. Here are a handful of the ageless portraits of cities, towns, landscapes and people, that the esteemed director has pulled from the past and realized on screen.
Dazed and Confused (1993)
One of Linklater's most auto-biographical time capsules and unquestionably his most iconic, Dazed and Confused has transcended its once cult-like status to becoming an unassailable American classic. Set in a suburb of Austin Texas in 1976, every element of the story is tied intrinsically to the time period. The music, cars, hairstyles, clothes, and the attitudes of the deep roster of characters are all so well-observed, that if the movie weren't so funny and well-structured it could nearly pass for documentary.
The slow motion tracking shot through the Emporium, the hilarious dialogue exchanges that take place at the keg party in the forest, and the culminating drive set to Foghat's "Slow Ride", are just a few moments that make the movie feel so quintessentially 70s. In many ways, the visual vocabulary and music from this film quite literally formed the perception of what life was like as an adolescent in 70s, for every generation that that came after it.
Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)
The spiritual sequel to Dazed, 2016's Everybody Wants Some might not have achieved the timeless status of its predecessor (yet), but this college comedy is an equally fun watch in almost every way. If Dazed fans ever wondered: "What happened to Mitch Kramer after he made it through the oncoming gauntlet of high school?" They needn't look further than this raucous snapshot of the first week of college life for a Freshman baseball player in 1980.
A more fun first weekend at college is hard to imagine. All the traumatic elements of hazing and social hierarchy that are present in Dazed, are replaced with a youthful spirit of competitive comradery paired with an insatiable urge to party. Expertly cast, costumed, and written, the team's dynamic is instantly believable. A scene featuring a car full of dudes all rapping every word to "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill Gang is probably the most concentrated moment of early 80s bliss in the entire runtime.
Me and Orson Welles (2008)
Aside from being one of our great film artists, Linklater (founder of the Austin Film Society), also possesses a Scorsese-esque knowledge and preoccupation with film history. So trying his hand at a film like the woefully under-seen historical backstage drama Me and Orson Welles was an inevitable outcome. In the film, before making his legendary transition into filmmaking with Citizen Kane (1941), Orson Welles cast a 17-year-old high school student played by Zac Efron in his new production of Julius Caesar, irrevocably changing the course of his life young life.
The film delights in the late-1930s New York period design of its sets and characters. Linklater's re-staged depiction of Broadway in its neon-lighted heyday is wonderfully specific. Simultaneously one of Linklater's most exuberant and elegiac statements, the film's juxtaposition of one artist coming into his own, and another who is just barely finding out who he is, is deeply effective. Check it out if you missed this one.
The Newton Boys (1998)
Yet another unfortunately under-discussed historical biopic from the Texan auteur's filmmography. After a string of critical successes, Linklater now armed with the unprecedented support of a studio budget, set out to make The Newton Boys. His first chance to make a time capsule movie on a bigger scale. The film follows the Newton Gang, a real life family of bank robbers hailing from Uvalde Texas, who were prominent bank robbers across the south and beyond during the early 1920s.
Linklater's first and only earnest foray into the pulpy genres of heist films and westerns, the movie remains a compelling, stylistic curiosity in the context of the rest of his career. Whether the film fully delivers on the promise of its exciting premise and its loaded cast is debatable, but the tangible feeling of the world that the movie creates still manages to thoroughly engross the viewer. Heist fans should give this one a shot on principle, and so should anyone else who appreciates a good old-fashioned family crime story.
Apollo 10 1/2 (2022)
They say the devil is in the details and so is the story in the newest Linklater joint. A reflective fantasy of a young boy named Stan living in the Houston area amidst the height of the American space age. One day he gets covertly chosen by NASA to be the fledgling pilot for a secret solo mission into undiscovered space, all during the fateful summer of 1969. However, the whole "going to space" element is secondary to the film's real mission; finding joy and reverence in every last detail in the life of a middle-class family at that precise time, in that exact place.
A significant chunk of the movie is dedicated entirely to the detailed description of all the ways that Stan and his siblings passed the time as kids. From an impressive collection of period-appropriate board games, to a lengthy list of hyper-specific 60s TV shows, to watching the moon landing on TV as a family in real time. Watching this rotoscope animated nostalgia bomb, is the equivalent of going back to one's childhood home, and re-discovering every last meaningful object from their youth, anew. This film is the literal definition of a time capsule.
Boyhood (2014)
Boyhood is among the most celebrated films of the twenty-first century, let alone Linklater's career. A movie that literally broke the mold of the coming-of-age story wide open by literally shooting the film with the same cast over the course of twelve years. An unparalleled experiment with the limits of storytelling through the medium of cinema, that will likely endure as a kind of capstone to Linklater's lifelong project of attempting to capture other lifetimes on screen.
Similar to Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy's the Before Trilogy (shot over the course of 9 years), Boyhood takes a page from Russian cinematic poet Andrei Tarkovsky by telling its story through the sculpting of time. We see the family unit, played with stunning verisimilitude by Patrica Arquette, Ethan Hawke, and Ellar Coltrane, actually age in real time. Of course the movie's forensic attention to detail in the design of the respective time periods that the story takes place in is uniformly amazing. The veracity of the production design informs the characters, and speaks to the true essence of hazy nostalgia and quotidian drama that the film is ultimately trying to capture.
Bernie (2011)
Based on a true story from deep in the heart of Texas, Bernie follows the unlikely friendship between an aggressively amiable mortician and the meanest widow in town, until their unbalanced fellowship ends in a violent crime that has the whole town talking. That town being Carthage, a lovably eccentric east Texas community that essentially serves as the third lead of the film. Bernie is Jack Black's finest hour as a performer, and one of Linklater's most precise visions of an existing place.
Throughout the movie there are 'talking head' interviews with the people of Carthage in which they discuss the increasingly unhealthy dynamic of Bernie and Marjorie's friendship, which precipitated the grisly act. The pseudo-documentary style of these interviews, and the subject of the story as a whole, puts this movie in some fascinating nexus between documentary and fiction that has seldom been captured in film history. It also contains standout supporting performances from both Matthew McConaughey and his Mother!
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