Less than seven minutes in I could sense there would be trouble. The opening scene took place in a rail car – scattered riders, mostly German. There was a French girl, then an American, both of them en route from Budapest to Vienna. Every passenger appeared either isolated or antagonized. This was, I assumed, an attempt at demonstrating how the entire world gets lost in translation. Only it smacked of condescension, and the ringing got much worse from there.
Over the course of a five-hour trilogy, Richard Linklater included enough intellectual name-dropping to put Woody Allen’s oeuvre to shame: Apollo, W.H. Auden, Honore de Balzac, Marlon Brando, Albert Einstein, Euripides, Sigmund Freud, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Vaclav Havel, Ernest Hemingway, Joan of Arc, Elia Kazan, Martin Luther King, Medea, Henry Miller, Sylvia Plath, Django Reinhardt, Georges Seurat, William Shakespeare, Socrates, Dylan Thomas, Leo Tolstoy, Lech Walesa, Thomas Wolfe … Holy Fuck!
I mean, imagine, if you will, how intolerable it might be to sit across from anyone who would insist on cramming all those names into a dialogue?