Review of Slacker

People share their random thoughts as they walk through their lives, chat at coffee shops, and preach on street corners. Everybody's got a theory and they seem to have a suspiciously nihilistic throughline: it's the 90's and all the good reasons for getting out of the house have been used up by the anarchists, the radicals, and the rooftop snipers. As we meet dozens of characters in thinly connected vignettes, we get a vivid picture of a time, a place, and a group of people. As Richard Linklater himself says in the opening monologue, all the choices that we make in our lives create alternate realities spinning off into space, formed by the possibility that we could have made a different choice, thereby creating a different future. Deep? Oh yes. Is life really like this? Definitely. We meet someone in a convenience store for two minutes, get a picture of their life, formulate some questions about them, and then, poof, they're gone, and you never know what happened, just as we never know what happened to the boy who runs down his mother, the couple who weren't on the guest list, the roommate who disappears, or any of the other characters in "Slacker."

But is it worth a movie? Open question, as far as I'm concerned. With such a string of unanswered questions, the audience eventually tires and refuses to invest emotionally in anything, knowing that they will be, once again, left hanging. Sure, life is just like that, but, like Andy Warhol's day-long film of the Empire State Building, the experiment might be better in theory (and in one of the coffee table conversations so prevalent in "Slacker") than in practice.