A Scanner Darkly - 2006 - Film

Friday, July 7, 2006

What made Waking Life (2001) fantastic and lively was that the physical characters and their dialogues were a montage of of-the-moment thoughts and movements, stream-of-consciousness art where the characters speak and grow into their voice by virtue of the action itself. The animation, which was painted over human actors on the film stock, bubbled and popped with color and contrast, always moving and growing, and never settling on a flat, static image. The animation work on A Scanner Darkly follows the same style of Linklater's former film, but projects a story much hazier in purpose and fuction. A Scanner Darkly, rather, is content to replay the form of Waking Life but bogs itself down in frustrated rhetoric about the future. The result is a film that contradicts itself: at the same time that the animation twists and squirms to life, the characters are forced through a gauntlet of delusory conversations that have no inspired beginning or end.

Substance D is the narcotic that drugs the characters into long non-conversations about simple things turned complex. A topic about nothing (e.g. the number of gears on a bike) is leaden with with language straight out of the thesaurus. The drugs make them hallucinate, become numb to the reality of their surroundings. James Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) babbles out philosophical analogies and polysyllabic words so frequently that his language loses meaning, too. Everything they say and do is removed from reality and morphed into a nightmare like the kind you have when you are only half-asleep. They know they are physically bound to their settings, but the images they see are mere hints of what's really there, and even those are obscured and bloated out of form. Bob Arcter (Keanu Reeves) is an agent who inadvertently gets addicted to Substance D during his time undercover as a doped-up burn-out with James and his cohorts. But the funny thing is, even when he's out-of-cover back at his office he's forced to wear a "scatter suit," a cloak that shifts from endless different faces, profiles and bodies, all moving and changing simultaneously, so that his true identity is never clear.

In the times that Bob plays himself as the agent at work, not undercover and under the influence, his body is a rainbow collage of faces and color, as are his couterparts. From his perspective it's never clear who is observing who. He's ill a ease and D is the only thing that helps him find reality, or rather, an escape. The meandering D-dictated conversations lead endlessly with no hopeful light at the end of the tunnel, they can't see, they're lost in the dark. A Scanner Darkly is a bleak social picture of today if we are indeed wandering in the dark without aim or purpose, if the potential energy and wonder of life is squelched by imposed powers of a higher institution; hopefully it is not true that, as the film's tagline reads, "everything is not going to be ok," hopefully there remain things inspiring in the spontaneous, and even mundane of life that punctures this pessimistic prediction.