Motor-mouthing roommates trip out on heavy narcotics. Their suburban house is under surveillance. A Big Brother government intrudes into citizens’ lives in the name of the war on drugs.
You guessed it, some things never change. With a gonzo cast led by Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson, A Scanner Darkly is Richard Linklater’s slavish “animated” version of the dystopian novel.
Philip K. Dick published the book in 1977. The story is set in a bleak suburban housing tract in Orange County, Calif., seven years in the future.
Like the cynical novel, the cynical film has relevance to current social and political debates about public vs. private concerns in the U.S. of A.
But if A Scanner Darkly is timely, it is not very obvious. Instead, it offers up a dark world that is revealed in a deliberately obtuse manner, emotionally scattered and intellectually convoluted.
That should be no surprise, since all the core characters in the story are strung out on drugs or secretly investigating drug abuse, or even both.
As a result of Linklater’s approach, however, some critics have been railing against the film since it launched at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Personally, I don’t see what the fuss is about. Good art, even agitprop, should not spell things out like a university lecture. The viewer should be obliged, or inspired, to glean “the truth” from what is presented.
Not that the film is free of problems, but the casting is sheer genius. Monotoned Reeves, playing a double role as a narc in disguise and as a drug abuser, is best in this kind of material, as he demonstrated in the Matrix trilogy. Downey is brilliant, using his own life experience with drugs and paranoia to feed his character. Harrelson is comic, Rory Cochrane does a savage cameo as a junkie trying to escape a horde of bugs and it is cool to see Ryder resurrected from career-killing shame.
None of this would have worked, however, as straight dramatic action and dialogue. Linklater used the same digital animated technique he employed on Waking Life (2001) to animate A Scanner Darkly. Live scenes were filmed and, in a process that takes 500 hours of work to produce one minute of film, these scenes were painted over frame by frame in a computer.
That allowed Linklater to melt faces, shift bodies in rhythm with their fractured states of mind and flow them into arbitrary, even fantastical settings.
It’s a trip.
BOTTOM LINE
This dark, edgy, adult-themed animation gets the same rating as the Pirates Of The Caribbean sequel — but that doesn’t make them equal, or aimed at the same audience. This one is for the artsy, angry crowd.
(This film is rated 14A)
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