Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Review: A Scanner Darkly
When Richard Linklater makes a movie, narrative is never his top priority. The narrative is there, however untraditional it may be, but his primary interest as director is always to capture the details of whatever world he is creating--a Texas high school in 1976, hipster Austin in the early 90's, or, in this case, a house full of paranoid drug addicts. Linklater keeps the narrative from his source material, Philip K. Dick's cult novel, but focuses his attention on the action that happens between the lines of the storyThis eye for detail pulls you into the paranoid world of perpetually baked characters played by Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Rory Cochrane, who spend their lives in a world of impaired logic and paranoia. The audience becomes so thoroughly immersed in this world that they may find themselves actually following the logic as the characters try to ascertain how many gears are on a stolen bike (and what may have happened to the missing gears).
This immersion is aided by the advanced rotoscoping technique that Linklater employed in his earlier film, Waking Life. The animation is toned down considerably from Waking Life, and put more in service of the story and characters, but it still envelopes the viewer in a trippy, disorienting world. The most dizzying moments occur when the film cuts from a close-up of an actor to a wide shot of customers in a convenience store or cars on a freeway. For a moment, your eyes think the film has switched to live action, then they orient and see the animation again.
For most of the movie's running time, it plays as a comedy. Keanu is given the role of the straight man, while Harrelson, Cochrane and especially Downey all act like insane acid heads. Downey steals the show, unquestionably, with his meth-tongued rants about security cameras, evil organizations and the effects of Substance D, the drug that is fueling the film's craziness. But what keeps this from being a tedious improv exercise is Linklater's continual grounding of the lunacy in reality. It's not just that we know this is how acid freaks talk (it seems likely that real-life experience was a central qualification in casting), but we also recognize the physical geography: the freeways, convenience stores, and housing developments of suburban southern California. When we see a tract home on a tree-lined street that has been allowed to deteriorate under a pile of clutter, we immediately flinch at the recognition of some acquaintance who took off down the drug road halfway through their career, or the house we used to buy pot from. This, again, is Linklater's greatest strength.
Where his weakness comes in is in the final third of the film, when he has to get down to the business of telling the story. Not that he does so badly--in fact, I would have to commend him for making the transition from comedy to tragedy so seamlessly. It's a slow transition throughout the second half of the film that seems to slowly seep into the story rather than abruptly jolting the audience. But it also doesn't feel like something Linklater has his heart in. You get the idea that he would rather have just made another hour of his freaked out characters tripping through their private world.
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