School's out for summer and the kids are looking to party in Dazed and Confused, the brilliant ensemble comedy/drama from writer/director Richard Linklater (Slacker, Waking Life). Set in Austin, Texas, on the last day of the school year in 1976, the film follows a large ensemble cast over a single 24-hour period as they celebrate the arrival of summer with car trunks full of Bud and a seemingly endless supply of pot. While everyone will ultimately converge on one big beer bash, the first half of the film centers on initiation rituals in which the senior girls and guys haze the incoming freshmen. It's a fascinating portrait of a tradition that combines institutionalized violence and tribal rites of passage. Yet here, as in the rest of the film, Linklater eschews the kind of detached satire practiced by contemporaries like Todd Solondz. Dazed and Confused may expose the vapidity of this mid-'70s suburban world, yet Linklater embraces his characters and milieu with the same big-hearted compassion that George Lucas displayed in American Graffiti. Indeed, Dazed and Confused can be seen as a virtual homage to the Lucas masterpiece, with the same loving attention to an era's clothes, hairstyles, and, of course, music. As in Graffiti, period pop songs provide the soundtrack for the characters' lives as they cruise around town, with 8-track tapes blasting the likes of Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, War, Peter Frampton, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The ensemble cast includes Wiley Wiggins (star of Linklater's Waking Life), Parker Posey, Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey, and a host of others whose naturalistic acting evokes a remarkable feeling of authenticity. And the easy way in which Linklater weaves introspective and even metaphysical themes into a slice-of-life comedy is completely engaging. The result is both a brilliant, microcosmic portrait of an era and an offbeat mediation on the rituals of teen life.
