A true author, a director capable of tackling any genre, from Rohmerian romanticism to pure comedy, from experimentation to pop, with taste, tact, culture and a great deal of passion for cinema (and rock). Let’s retrace Richard Linklater’s filmography, on the occasion of the release, from today only in cinemas, of his new film Hit Man.
There is no other director at this moment in the United States, and perhaps in the whole world, capable of being at the same time a symbol of auteur cinema, as experimental and popular as Richard Linklater. One who has the respect of the most intransigent cinephiles, and who is able to entertain and move the great masses of the public.
Texan, born in 1960, Linklater he was among those – few – who at the dawn of the nineties was able to translate into cinema the anxieties, the existential confusion and the new demands of Generationthat of the grungejust to be clear: it proves it Slackerhis second work, but also the following one Life is a Dream. Which is not just the film for which the director obtained full recognition, or the one in which very young actors named Milla Jovovich, Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck e Renée Zellwegerbut also what where Linklater he linked, or rather superimposed, Gen
Two years after this generational cult, Linklater confirms his talent and consecrates his ability to tell a generation and a season with life with Before sunrisethe most Rohmerian film ever released by American cinema, a heartbreaking and delicate love story lasting one night (or a lifetime: another temporal paradox) that then the Texan and his two protagonists, Ethan Hawke e Julie Delpythey continued to tell in the following Before Sunset – Before Sunsete Before Midnight.
At this point you will probably have understood that the passage of time is one of the authorial obsessions of Linklaterwho experimented with the image using the rotoscope technique in his own way Waking Lifein A Scanner Darkly and in the recent Apollo 10 and a halftook his experimentation with time to the extreme in the project of Boyhooda film in which Linklater narrated in an exemplary and engaging way the growth of a boy named Mason (played by Ellar Coltrane) and his relationship with his divorced parents (Hawke again, and Patricia Arquette) shooting over the course of twelve years: from 2002 to 2014.
In all this, as we said, Richard Linklater However, he has never forgotten the importance (for himself and for the industry, as well as for the public) of an alternation between very personal, artistic and experimental projects, and others that have been able to best represent – a best made of accessibility and quality together – a more pop and popular cinema. And so here it is, after the aforementioned Waking Life and the equally experimental Tapeand project Boyhood already arrived, work with Jack Black in an irresistible comedy in which, by bonding with Life is a Dreamvents all his love for music: School of Rock. But also remaking an old classic for children with Walter Matthau in Bad News Bears – What a pain if you meet the Bears.
In short: Richard Linklater he has no problem alternating styles and registers. Indeed, he does it with great taste, and even often, if not always, tries to make opposites coexist, as his lesser-known but very beautiful films tell us, such as Bernie, Last Flag Flying o What happened to Bernadette?.
In a way, that’s what he did in his latest one too. Hit Man: yes, it is a hilarious comedy, the likes of which we haven’t seen in years, and endowed with a high level of erotic charge thanks to the incredible chemistry that the protagonists have Glen Powell and Adrja Arionabut which is also a film capable of reflecting, between the lines and the laughter, on serious issues, such as identity, self-confidence, the pressure (social or self-imposed) to correspond to predefined expectations and images.
