When Richard Linklater starts talking sports, his hands move with great sweeps and waves as if a favorite game were suddenly being realized before his very eyes. It is the deep muscle memory of a man who, long before he was composing extended tracking shots for a living, was tracking down deep fly balls in the endless Texas air.
A couple of summers ago, when Linklater sat to talk “Boyhood,” the conversation kicked up a few notches when we began talking about our own boyhoods — of being competitive junior athletes in the ’80s, and of the role that sports can play in paving one path to manhood.
Linklater has a new film out this week, “Everybody Wants Some!!,” which is being billed as a “spiritual” sequel, of sorts, to his coming-of-age classic “Dazed and Confused” of a quarter-century ago. The new film centers on a band of small-college Texas ballplayers in 1980 — material that draws inspiration from the director’s own freshman season as a Texas baseball player on scholarship, before he got injured and his passion turned fully to film.
As you watch “Everybody Wants Some!!,” it is easy to pulled in by the bonding rituals of physically gifted manchildren who are still testing their way in the world. They are freshly launched balloons of fresh optimism and mild entitlement. And they feed on all forms of competition as if sucking back Lone Star longnecks.
Yet there is one element that Linklater holds back till the late innings of the film. We see all manner of casual sport, but only once, and late, do we finally hit the diamond for their sport. Baseball is their ultimate focus and purposeful release, so seeing them test each other on the field effectively functions as the climax in a movie that purposefully avoids any standard dramatic arcs. This “sports” film is not some vision quest; it is far more simply a vibe.
College baseball is fiercely competitive, of course, and yet being on a team provides the security of being its own Neverland. Even some lost boys nearing 30 might angle to extend their stays on this suspended field of dreams.
Yet when the young actors finally take the field, they move like ballplayers. They don’t just jaw at each other like real teammates; they glide over the mound and in the batter’s box and around the horn like guys who have lived and breathed this game. And they have the subtle tics and hitches that ballplayers invariably pick up: the mitt motioning toward a catcher, or the juggling of the resin bag, or the waggling of the bat head before timing and turning on an inside pitch.
I spotlight all this because filmmaking, like illustration, is very much a visual sport. As a budding teenage sports cartoonist, I used to sketch then-San Diego Padres star Kevin McReynolds, as well as his Hall of Fame teammate Tony Gwynn. So in “Everybody Wants Some!!,” when a lefty-swinging ballplayer named McReynolds belts a batting-practice homer, I’m reminded of what it’s like to try to capture pure physical grace through a visual medium.
Linklater has an unerring eye for this grace, not only as a visual stickler, but also as a former left fielder and fleet base stealer who studied the subtleties of the game like an artist.
That might sound not so uncommon, but trust me, it is. Hollywood is littered with the embarrassing clips of actors who tried to fake playing athletes on film and failed. Watching even a great talent such as Anthony Perkins or Robert De Niro or Ray Liotta trying to impersonate a ballplayer breaks the suspension of disbelief of anyone who has really studied the game.
Still, when I used to work in a newspaper sports department while in college, we watched films such as “Bull Durham” (written by former minor leaguer Ron Shelton) and “The Natural” and appreciated that stars could move like college-level ballplayers. And though Liotta looked awfully awkward in “Field of Dreams,” Kevin Costner sure tossed with Dad like a natural — and even the film’s white-haired Burt Lancaster harked back to old films in which this gifted athlete and circus artist had credibly played Jim Thorpe.
In the art of motion pictures, it’s not such an easy thing to find actors who can convincingly play the motion of sports.
A round of applause, a high-five and a fist-bump are earned by the filmmaker who has the eye to render such grace.