Set in a single, grim Michigan motel room, Richard Linklater's latest film, Tape, has an air of let's-put-on-a-movie spontaneity--and concentration--that's often missing from contemporary American pictures. This refreshing charge derives in part from the film's terse concept (a trio of high-school friends are reunited 10 years after graduation), but it also comes from the low-cost, less-fuss new digital video technology that Linklater is toying with here.
The film's scruffy surface is, though, deceptive. Linklater's dramaticapproach is quite sophisticated, and Tape, for all its mumbled dialogue and pseudo-verité camera work, is actually a work of clever calculation, its apparently raw energy drawn from a careful balance of chance and choice, state-of-the-art materials and traditional narrative techniques. And however "ordinary" the people in the film are meant to be, the fact that two of them are played by Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, downtown glamour couple par excellence, only adds to the sense that Linklater is partly putting us on with the bargain-basement feel of his picture.
Then again, it's no surprise that the actors were hungry for such meaty,uncharacteristic roles. (Thurman, for one, is especially fine when cast againstvampy type.) Nor should we doubt Linklater's motivations in making the filmquickly, simply, and on the cheap: Of all the so-called American independentswho've found mainstream fame in the last decade or so, Linklater has remainedamong the closest to his underground roots.
Once an aspiring writer who took a job on an oil rig so that he could spendhis days reading, Linklater has tried his hand at Hollywood production yet hasalways returned to Austin, Texas, his hometown, as he has returned to writing anddirecting for himself and to asking, in a variety of intriguing ways, the samequestions that have haunted him all along. These questions range from theanthropological (how do smart, young, underemployed Americans talk?) to thephilosophical (what causes time to expand and contract, depending on one's stateof mind and the company one keeps?). Lots of American directors have shticks, butfew have steep and lasting concerns. Linklater is one of the few whose oeuvre hastaken shape over the years as a restless and ongoing search for intricateanswers.
Linklater's initial success came with Slacker, a Zeitgeisty 1991 picture whose fluid, meandering structure was the source of both its charm and its limitation, as the aimlessness of the characters merged somehow with the aimlessness of the film. Slacker worked (or didn't, depending on your point of view) by eavesdropping on the conversations of dozens of twenty-something Austin chatterboxes and drones, and closing with a sobering, slightly sophomoric shot of the camera being tossed off a cliff. The picture then blurred and tumbled, as if we in the audience had also been given the heave-ho.
Godard, too, had ended a movie with the deadpan declaration that the Fin duCinema was nigh, but--given the nervy brilliance of the film that led up to thatannouncement, Weekend--somehow we didn't believe him. To judge from the final frames of Slacker, the imminent end (of art, ambition, American culture) looked a good deal more likely. I remember being at once annoyed and depressed by this movie when I first saw it as a recent and, I admit, easily annoyable college graduate. Many other people my age "connected" with Slacker, but it seemed to me to glorify everything lost and self-indulgent about my generation, X. Why, I wondered, was a gifted man like Linklater--himself a few years older than most of his subjects--frittering his talents and wasting his time chronicling the b.s. sessions of these various bozos and bores? The film struck me as embodying all the syndromes (lassitude, anemia, self-absorption) it diagnosed.
Subsequent viewings have softened me on the movie, which is, it turns out,better appreciated as a Max Ophuls-styled roundelay or slow-mo relay race than asa commentary on the inertial state of so many confused young Americans. Evidentalready in that first film--I can see now--is Linklater's keen ear for believablywordy dialogue and his eye for telling spatial relations. It's hard to think ofanother contemporary American director with such a highly evolved sense of thecomplex relation between foreground and background, character and setting.
Since then, Linklater has directed a range of studio-funded movies, includingthe intelligently sunny high-school comedy Dazed and Confused, the intelligently gloomy post-high-school tragicomedy SubUrbia (based on an Eric Bogosian play), and the muralistic historical epic The Newton Boys. He also co-wrote and directed the looser, more intimate Before Sunrise--in which the American Ethan Hawke and the French Julie Delpy met on a Paris-bound train. The pair debarked together for a sleepless night in Vienna and spent the next 14 hours cuddling, playing pinball, and exchanging big ideas. More ambitious than a formula film like Dazed, this romantic chamber piece was also more of a mixed bag. The stars were winning, the situation sexy, and the extremely talky tilt of the script intriguing. The dorm-room-deep profundities that these lovebirds swapped in the course of their one long date, however, were almost insufferable. We may have appreciated the idea of the film--to put the verbal snap back into on-screen flirtation--but actually sitting still as these two pretty people yacked about everything from palm reading to death and Quaker weddings was a tall order indeed.
While all of these films showed promise of one kind or another, none preparedus for the tremendous leap Linklater made with his last movie, the gravelybeautiful, wise Waking Life, released earlier this fall. That magical movie unfurls as a series of overlapping dreams, filmed with actors then painted over digitally by a group of animators whose touch differs from scene to scene, yet whose work retains throughout the quality of breath and flux.
No one ever holds still in this film (a woman's bottle-curls swirl likeminiature tornadoes around her face; the eyes of a physicist shift then bulgethen retract as he makes an important point), and as we watch their volatilemutations, it almost seems we're watching the shape and movement of consciousnessitself. The film might be an ultrasound of the director's brain. WakingLife flows like a literal dream not only by perfectly matching lightness to weight, form to content, but also by focusing everything Linklater has done to this point. All those old questions of time and space, being and nothingness, remain--though they're cut free of their dilettantish or ironic moorings and seem suddenly essential, even pressing--as the director also reckons with a whole new set of mysteries. A cartoon about desire, free will, death, God, and Andre Bazin's notion of filmic ontology may sound like the height of pretension. In fact, it's an utter delight, the most texturally enjoyable and, yes, profound American movie of the year.
Which brings us back to Tape, a film that, it ought to be said, has nothing of the intellectual audacity or visual wonder of Waking Life. It speeds by instead as a kind of afterthought or palette-clearing postmeal sorbet to chase that full-blown feast. This is not meant as a put-down. If anything, it's precisely the movie's modest dimensions, lack of flash, and intense format that make it worth seeing.
Adapted by Stephen Belber from his play of the same name, Tape retains its theatrical trappings and unfolds over a few hours within the walls of that one motel room. Vince (Hawke), a Rolling Rock-guzzling part-time dope dealer, spends most of the film drunk and high in his boxer shorts. He's proud to be juvenile and boorish and would wear his arrested development on his sleeve if he would only get dressed.
Near the start of the movie, Vince's former best buddy, the straighter, morereserved John (Robert Sean Leonard), knocks on the door and the two exchange around of raucous hugs and slaps. Their affection for each other appearsinseparable from their mutual, masculine hostility and suspicion, and Belber'sscript allows them a full act to get reacquainted. The dialogue zips betweenthem, as editor Sandra Adair jumps in nervous staccato between the two and, inthe case of a few especially anxious moments, doesn't break away at all. Thencinematographer Maryse Alberti's camera goes veering from one side of the room tothe next, in regular NYPD Blue style.
It seems John slept with Vince's ex-girlfriend Amy way back when they were all18, and Vince is still upset about it, going so far as to accuse John of rape.John, meanwhile, doesn't see why his friend is so hung up on the past. He fancieshimself much more mature and would prefer just to get on with his life--thoughthis, we soon see, may be a convenient way of dodging responsibility for some ofhis former actions. In the second half, Amy (Thurman) herself--now a put-togetherassistant D.A. in a sensible sweater set--arrives on the scene, and theaccusations and recriminations mount as each of the characters seems to have adistinct, and contradictory, memory of what took place senior year.
For better or worse, the dynamic between the three has something of thebristling tension of an acting-class exercise in which subtext is the theme ofthe day's lesson. The characters may yammer on about high school, but the realsubject of their standoff is the present moment: Who is strongest now? As theytake turns dominating the proceedings, our sympathies keep shifting around.
Linklater's direction is taut and unfussy. He's most interested in the actors,who all do an excellent job, and in the script, which--despite a few unfortunatereflexive gestures, such as the decision to make John's character an independentfilmmaker, of all things--has the slope and sound of real conversation and asurprising ethical dimension.
Other critics have compared the movie to Hitchcock's virtuoso 1948 experimentRope, which was also an adaptation of a play set over the course of a few hours and in one claustrophobic setting--though Hitchcock's use of 10 uninterrupted 10-minute takes had quite a different rhythmic and tonal effect than does Linklater's jittery montage. More important still, while the murder at the center of the Hitchcock film is undeniable (the body is packed in a chest that remains on screen throughout), the crime around which the Linklater movie revolves may not even have happened. This uncertainty itself--and the vaporous moral force field that it implies for us all--lends Tape its cutting edge.
