More than any other of Richard Linklater’s films, with the possible exception of Before Sunset (2004), 1993's Dazed and Confused is a great film to revisit. From the opening shots in the school parking lot, set to the tune of Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion,” everything falls into place, and all you can do is go along for the ride. The film covers the last day of the 1976 school year and the night that follows, and it deals with the lives of an assortment of characters, never really settling on a particular storyline. But it must be said that the previous statement is meant as an absolute compliment, as it is when talking about the best of Altman, particularly his 1975 masterpiece Nashville about a weekend in the titular city. If Linklater shares some of Altman’s talent for interweaving the lives of a large number of characters in a natural and altogether cinematic way, he differs from him in the way he approaches the material, which is to say that he lacks some of the older master’s deep cynicism. Dazed and Confused is, no doubt, a film bound to be tinged with nostalgia, at least to some extent, but, like the best works that try to recreate past decades (and I’m really thinking more about a brilliant TV show like Freaks and Geeks rather than George Lucas' highly uneven American Graffiti [1973], a film often mentioned in discussions about this movie), Linklater’s panorama of the 1970s could conceivably work just as well as a movie about young people living in the early 1960s or the late 1980s. There’s something about the way Linklater carefully observes the small moments in people’s lives which goes beyond any specific time and place, the evidence of this being that I, someone who wasn’t even old enough to see Dazed and Confused in theaters, could find so much about my own high school experience on display here. All of this and I haven’t really said anything about the film itself, but it’s probably just as well. See it.
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