Sundance ’16: Richard Linklater—Dream is Destiny

Who is the most representative Sundance alumnus, Richard Linklater or Kevin Smith? Both have brought many projects to the festival and are represented again this year in some form. It is a close call, but the Oscar love shown for Boyhood (which had a special sneaky screening last year) tips the scale to Linklater. Austin’s favorite filmmaker is affectionately profiled in SXSW senior director Louis Black’s Richard Linklater—Dream is Destiny, which screens during the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.

Linklater came along with Slacker at precisely the right time. It was practically a work of outsider cinema, but it had enough polish to catch the rising indie wave. He thought he was going studio with Dazed and Confused, but the studio changed its mind. Nevertheless, audiences gravitated to his retro-Texan answer to American Graffiti over time. He also started working with a cat named McConaughey.

Soon thereafter, he began another fruitful long-term association with Ethan Hawke on the first of what he would jokingly refer to as the lowest grossing trilogy of all time. However, audiences caught up with the “Before” films into time to make Before Midnight a pretty impressive performer at the specialty box office. And then there was Boyhood.

Frankly, even IFC’s Jonathan Sehring sounds a little surprised his twelve year investment paid off. In some ways, his interview segments constitute another victory lap, but he is entitled, considering all the heat he took from the company’s finance people. There is indeed a good deal of Boyhood in Destiny, but it was twelve years of his life.

Generally, Black reasonably weights Linklater’s filmography, but the continued short shrift given to Me and Orson Welles feels unfair (one critic describes it as “the one that got away”). On the other hand, it is hard to blame him for sweeping Fast Food Nation under the rug (but honestly, his Bad News Bears remake wasn’t that bad. Really, it wasn’t).

Filmmaker profiles like Destiny or Tessa Louise-Salomé’s Mr. X: a Vision of Leos Carax are sort of tricky to review. For those of us covering festivals, they are nice palate cleansers. We can revisit some films we enjoyed, file away some insights for the next time we review their work, and then move on to another screening. However, we probably would not be so satisfied with the experience if we had paid the full ticket price.

Destiny is exactly the sort of doc that gets compared to DVD extras—and not without some justification. Still, Black scores interviews with most of Linklater’s big name collaborators and talks extensively with the man himself. He moves things along well enough and gives us a vivid sense of Linklater’s distinctly Texan environment. It is highly watchable, but probably still best suited for Linklater’s most passionate admirers. For those hardy fans, Richard Linklater—Dream is Destiny screens again this morning (1/31) in Park City, as part of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles

The inaugural production of Mercury Theatre had to make a suitably bold statement. In what was then a radical departure from tradition (but has since become conventional), Welles recast Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in Fascist Europe. Though the Mercury’s production of Caesar: Death of a Dictator was truly groundbreaking, the true star was Brutus, played by company cofounder and artistic director Orson Welles. Though in 1937 the Great Depression continued unabated while Fascism spread across Europe, it was still a heady time for one teenaged actor who witnesses the chaos of Welles’s creative process firsthand in Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (trailer here), which opens this Wednesday in New York and Los Angeles.

British actor Goerge Coulouris had the lead role of Mark Antony. Joseph Cotton had a small part as Publius. Yet the two actors best remembered from Welles’s celebrated Caesar, were of course the director himself, and the young Lucius, who serenaded Brutus in a pivotal late scene. In Linklater’s film, based on the novel by Robert Kaplow, that young actor is a wide-eyed Richard Samuels, who yearns to be part of the New York smart-set. However, working for the tempestuous auteur would be an education in and of itself for the young actor.

Welles can be charming, but he is also a demanding taskmaster. Though married, he has quite the roving eye. Yet his genius compensates for his arrogance—at least up to a point. In some of the film’s most insightful scenes, the brash Welles seems to understand on some level that he is just one failure away from a major karma blowback.

Given the renowned figures associated with the Mercury, Linklater had a number of casting challenges, but none was greater than the larger-than-life Welles. Yet, in choosing the virtually unknown Christian McKay, he found an actor able to approximate Welles’s incomparable presence, without descending into mere impersonation. Discovered while performing in the very off-off-Broadway production Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles, McKay captures the both the cadences and intensity of the Welles so familiar from his classic films.

In another tricky bit of casting, Eddie Marsan’s small but important supporting turn as John Houseman, the great British character actor (by way of Hungary), is absolutely pitch-perfect. His Houseman is an island of modest dignity amid the bedlam loosed by Welles’s destructive genius. While it is an even smaller role, Canadian actor James Tupper is also quite convincing as Joseph Cotton.

In a way, it is rather appropriate that High School Musical’s Zac Efron would have the lead in a film about the capriciousness of show business. In fact, he is relatively likable as young Samuels. Unfortunately, his love triangle rivalry with Welles for the affections of the director’s cold-bloodedly ambitious assistant Sonja Jones forms the weakest link of the film. In truth, Claire Danes’s Jones is decidedly unsympathetic and far less attractive than Samuels’s prospective girlfriend, Gretta Adler, an aspiring writer played by Zoe Kazan (granddaughter of the great director Elia Kazan).

Orson is utterly unlike Linklater’s prior work (including films like School of Rock and Dazed and Confused), but he clearly has a keen understanding of Orson Welles’s place in cinema history. He keeps the action moving along fairly jauntily, while paying knowing homage to Welles’s brilliant but checkered career.

Production designer Laurence Dorman masterfully recreates 1930’s New York and Jools Holland’s arrangements of vintage swing standards nicely evoke the right period vibe. Indeed, that sense of time and place is one of the handsomely assembled Orson’s greatest strengths. Ultimately, it is an effectively realized valentine to 1930’s Broadway and the mercurial talent of Orson Welles. It opens this Wednesday (11/25) in New York and Los Angeles.