director/screenwriter
Richard Linklater
based on
the novel by
Philip K. Dick
producers
Tommy Pallotta
Jonah Smith
Erwin Stoff
Anne Walker-McBay
Palmer West
music
Graham Reynolds
cinematographer
Shane F. Kelly
editor
Sandra Adair
cast
Keanu Reeves (Bob Arctor)
Robert Downey Jr. (James Barris)
Woody Harrelson (Ernie Luckman)
Winona Ryder (Donna Hawthorne)
Rory Cochrane (Charles Freck)
Melody Chase (Arctor's Wife)
Turk Pipkin (Creature)
Alex Jones (Street Prophet)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 100m
u.s.
release: 7/7/06
video
availability: TBA
official website
other richard
linklater films
reviewed on this website:
- the bad
news bears
- before
sunrise
(short
review)
- before
sunset
- the
newton boys
- school
of rock
- suburbia
- waking
life
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The drug-induced paranoia of
Philip K. Dick and the easygoing good nature of Richard Linklater
make an unstable mix. A Scanner Darkly, which Linklater
directed from Dick's 1977 cult novel, ultimately plays to too
few of Linklater's strengths; it's garrulous and digressive,
but the mood of bitter noir paranoia smothers our enjoyment
like a hot wet blanket. Linklater may have admired the novel
-- I do, too -- but that doesn't necessarily make him the ideal
director for this material. Neither does the convenient fact
that he has a high-tech rotoscoping animation facility (left
over from his 2001 film Waking Life)
at his disposal. The animation tweaks reality just a notch, supplying
a plausible visual launchpad for the film's hallucinatory moments,
but that's really all it does. For most of the movie, we're watching
painstakingly animated footage of people talking.
Which was fine in Waking
Life, Linklater's phantasmagoric sketchpad movie of
ideas. In that film, the style changed according to each speaker,
illuminating and sometimes even critiquing the verbiage. A
Scanner Darkly has the same glum look throughout -- it owes
a lot to graphic novels, especially the illustrations Julian
Allen did for Bruce Wagner's serialized Wild Palms.
Some touches, like the constantly shifting "scramble suits"
worn by narcotics agents to cloak their identities, are trippy
and inspired. But take away the look and you've got a bleak,
grubby tale that just isn't suited to Linklater's sensibilities.
The actors play their hearts out, particularly Robert Downey
Jr. as the loathsome know-it-all Barris. But the material seems
to be at a remove from us and from Linklater. There's nothing
here he can really hook into, nothing special he brings to it.
Keanu Reeves is actually rather
touching as Bob Arctor, a narc who gets addicted to the powerful
drug Substance D and, in the ultimate paranoid nightmare, finds
himself assigned to spy on himself. Bob lives and associates
with the expected drug casualties and outcasts, including a pugnacious
Woody Harrelson and a freaked-out Rory Cochrane. He's also in
love with Donna (Winona Ryder), a Substance D dealer he's using
in order to make a connection with the next dealer up the ladder.
Dick's narrative logic in the book -- faithfully reproduced in
the film -- is merciless and fatalistic, a despairing string
of catch-22s. Dick was writing from anguishing personal experience
-- he and many of his friends took heavy or fatal blows as a
result of drugs. Linklater doesn't seem to have that kind of
sadness or anger in him. So the film has no charge other than
its funkadelic look, and it starts to drag.
Linklater isn't a judgmental
director -- that's the strength of his warmer films, like Dazed
and Confused, in which no one is really bad.
And he allows Robert Downey Jr. to flesh out the double-crossing
Barris with an appealing, rabbity intensity. He feels for the
main characters, but when it comes time to delineate the corrupt
bureaucracy they're up against, Linklater can't come up with
anything. The piece's final twist comes off bland, as if Linklater
didn't believe in it. He may be happy to have fellow Austinite
and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in his films for cameo riffs,
but for Linklater, Jones' line of thinking (like Philip Dick's)
is just one of many that make up a complex world. Linklater tries
on Dick's paranoia like a scramble suit, but he never owns it,
and it doesn't fit him well.
A Scanner Darkly is certainly head and slumped shoulders
above the usual summer fare (a weak compliment), and it may lead
some viewers to Philip Dick's more fulfilling work -- or to Linklater's.
Unlike many films based on Dick's work (Blade Runner is
still the best; others include Total Recall, Minority Report, and
Paycheck), this is a movie made by a dutiful reader of
the novel, a reader careful to include the relevant passages
of the source material. As with the ultimately disappointing
film version of Fight Club,
I appreciated A Scanner Darkly on that level -- Linklater
had been faithful, hadn't screwed it up. Towards the end, Bob
Arctor ponders, "Does a scanner see clearly or darkly?"
Linklater doesn't see this material clearly or darkly enough.
I don't know who would, really; Philip Dick -- or, rather, the
mischievous yet depressive tone of his work -- is notoriously
hard to adapt. A Scanner Darkly comes closer than any
other movie has but still doesn't quite get there. Once again,
the old drug-addled guru -- twenty-four years dead now -- leaves
Hollywood far behind.
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