 |
Not since The Blair Witch Project has a film been so intentionally nausea inducing.
It's an animated feature in which the backgrounds are in constant wavy motion and constantly altering. It's akin to standing at the railing of a boat in turbulence and trying to focus on distant land masses and other boats.
Linklater actually filmed Waking Life as a live action feature using hand-held cameras then turned the footage over to animators.
They painted over the live action creating dream-like images to retell the story.
It's an appropriate technique because Waking Life is about the intersection of dreams and reality, waking and sleeping.
The central character Wiley Wiggins is not quite certain whether he has just awakened from a dream, or whether he is dreaming that he has awakened.
Wiley, like the backgrounds of his movie, is in constant motion.
He visits churches, prisons, subways, coffee houses, bridges, highways, his home and the homes of friends, professors and complete strangers.
At each destination he meets someone who rambles on about the meaning of life or dreams.
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who starred as lovers in Linklater's Before Sunrise. Adam Goldberg, who got his start in Linklater's Suburbia, also pops up in animated form.
These scenes are fun because the actors are so familiar.
Everyone in the film is either a teacher or student of philosophy, or just in awe of their own thought processes.
It's a bit like being at a coffee house with a gaggle of first year philosophy students who've just had their first few classes. There's far more enthusiasm than substance and what substance there may be is so watered down it sound more pretentious than profound.
Linklater is an astute man, as well as an adventurous filmmaker. He knows audiences wouldn't tolerate such a self-serving, self-congratulatory project if it had been presented in traditional live action.
Dressed up as an experimental animation film, Waking Life does have a better shelf life.
It's genuinely intriguing for about 20 minutes because it is an effective marriage of style and subject matter, but at 90 minutes it outstays its welcome.