Résumé : Newly arrived at university, Jake meets his companions from the university baseball team. With them, he will spend a memorable weekend before classes resume.
Critique : We have to shout out loud and clear all the good things we think about a film like Everybody Wants Some !!precious object, fetishistic and always cool. Under the false air of a post-American Pie beta film, Richard Linklater paints portraits of kids more or less on the verge of becoming adults, at a time when the carefreeness of the seventies still resonated in the first years of a decade that was going to be subsequently become that of Disco and Reagan’s America. Everybody Wants Some !!literally “Everybody Wants a Little Bit”, is the story of a group of baseball players who only have two things in mind: sport, and girls. Girls especially, this “little” they desire to the point of ridicule.
Clever, Richard Linklater, in addition to humorously questioning the sexual orientations of his characters (the barely veiled gay imagery is assumed without detours), gets rid of all cynicism, and transforms ridicule into a form of panache, making his characters of little heroes who fight for a cause, theirs. The director never looks down on his characters: the key, undoubtedly, to the success of this partially autobiographical story which functions as a nostalgic dive that is always light, never outdated.
- Annapurna Pictures ©
Like the protagonists who enjoy one last inconsistent weekend before the start of the school year, Everybody Wants Some !! is emptied of any dramatic stakes. The only obstacles encountered by the characters: the girls, not stupid and not fools, but no less predatory, in a benevolent and light hunt like a champagne bubble.
The film would be just that and that would already be good. But Richard Linklater has the audacity of the high roller and the game that goes with it. From the hovering Willoughby to the mentor Finnegan, via the taciturn Beuter or the hysterical Jay Niles, they are unforgettable, brilliantly sketched in two or three lines by a screenwriter/director who succeeds in giving a place to each member of the group, with good help by a four-star cast made up of complete or almost unknowns. As for the romance that emerges between Jake and Beverly, it gives rise to a riverside aside as charming as it is modest which testifies, beneath the apparent frivolity of feelings, to a reaffirmed romanticism.
- Annapurna Pictures ©
We can only hope that a film like Everybody Wants Some !! collects much more than a few favorable opinions from an indie press already acquired by Linklater. Because behind the commercial challenge of this little film lies an artistic challenge met with flying colors and which must be forcefully saluted. The celebration of a form of carelessness in the process of disappearing, an inconsistency of the statement that would have been celebrated with pomp to counter contemporary nihilism and cynicism integrated as dominant thought. Everybody Wants Some !!where the perfectly indispensable useless film.
- Annapurna Pictures ©
