Slacker
Richard Linklater, USA, 1991, 97 mins
Review by Gerald Houghton (1992)
For the record, slackers are urban drop-outs, unemployed - or barely working - at best creatively paranoid, more often than not merely paranoid. About a hundred slackers serve time in Richard Linklater's audacious $175,000 debut, none on screen above five minutes, none remotely approaching a characterisation. The trick of the film is rather like a less formally structured reading of John Sayles' brilliantly caustic City of Hope, Linklater trails individuals, the camera abandoning them when an apparently more fascinating figure floats into view, or it just gets bored. As the audience is taken into bars, homes, along streets, the film is so rigorously structured as to appear almost entirely random; the apparent product of the very slacker mentality itself.
The film has its longueurs, but its speed and invention ensures there will be another along in a minute. The director himself opens the batting, berating a cab driver with a discourse on The Wizard of Oz and the nature of alternate realities, before we spiral off through a hit and run, a man being arrested for murder, and on. As different acquaintances of the director take us on this once only tour of Austin, Texas, the possibility to be bored is always there; the audience is harangued with JFK assassination theories (particularly funny), the ominous hidden religious agenda camouflaged by the Smurfs, UFOs, a pushy young woman who sells a Madonna smear test, complete with pubic hair. Slacker is at its best in the occasional moment where it transcends free and easy comedy and touches a rawer nerve - witness the distinctly Ballardian a pop tart eating TV backpacker who never leaves his house, his reality filtered through a steady diet of electronic images.
Slacker may not be entirely original, but it is refreshingly out-there enough to elicit strong emotions both ways, coasting on a unobtrusive soundtrack of Texan hardcore luminaries - Crust, Ed Hall, Butthole Surfers - the 29 year old director only wrong-foots it once, facing down the dilemma of climaxing a plotless movie by the pedestrian method of seeing the camera tossed off a cliff. But that aside the film is an exceedingly funny, occasionally enlightening journey into the generation who "would have been aborted but it just wasn't hip at the time." As someone says, "coherence comes later."