24 hours in Austin, Texas. A passanger talks to an uninterested cab driver about how dreams might be their own fractured reality. A driver hits a woman on the street crossing and flees. Two police officers later arrest a man in his apartment. Three guys arrive at a bridge and throw a tent into the river, because the ex-girlfriend of one of the guys had sex with him in the tent, and he doesn't want her to have sex with anybody else in the tent. An old anarchist discovers a man wanting to rob his library, but instead just makes friends with the latter and goes for a walk with the lad. An unemployed man gives an interview. An old man walks on the street. Some people are making home videos in the outdoors.
There have been numerous anthology films throughout the history of cinema, but rarely the likes of Richard Linklater's second feature length film, the independent comedy "Slacker", where there is no main protagonist, and the episodic film just follows around 40 people throughout its running time, with each character getting only around two minutes of screen time. Moreover, the "jump" from one episode to another is equally as arbitrary, with the camera mostly following one person walking, and then switching to follow another person walking on the street. The big flaw is that "Slacker" is ultimately a 'hit-or-miss' affair: some episodes are better, some are weaker. Likewise, you cannot engage on a deeper level with these characters, since they are all shown so briefly. Yet, there is some positive energy in depicting these people, and a sense that Linklater captured the time, the feeling and the mentality of all these small people living around his hometown of Austin. Several humorous dialogues are refreshingly daft, such as the episode where a conspiracy nut is following a young lad to spread his "ideology" ("We've been on the Moon since the 50s!"); the unemployed hitchhiker who despises work ("Hey, look at me, I'm making it! I may live badly, but at least I don't have to work to do it!") and others. And there are also some more philosophical words hidden here and there, such as when a girl at a restaurant has some deeper thoughts ("Perhaps human beings weren't made for being happy or free. We constantly try to enslave each other."). "Slacker" is an early exercise of Linklater's, but he already showed small crumbs of greatness in a little scene near the end, when an old man walking on the street has a quote full of wisdom: "The tragedy of life is that man is never free yet strives for what he can never be. The thing most feared in secret always happens. My life, my loves, where are they now? But the more the pain grows, the more this instinct for life somehow asserts itself. The necessary beauty in life is in giving yourself to it completely. Only later will it clarify itself and become coherent."
Grade:++
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