director/screenwriter
Richard
Linklater
animator
Bob Sabiston
producers
Tommy Pallotta
Jonah Smith
Anne Walker-McBay
Palmer West
cinematographers
Richard Linklater
Tommy Pallotta
music
Glover Gill
editor
Sandra Adair
cast (voices)
Wiley Wiggins (Main Character)
Bill Wise (Boat Car Guy)
Robert C. Solomon (Philosophy Professor)
Kim Krizan (Herself)
J.C. Shakespeare (Self-Burning Man)
Ethan Hawke (Jesse)
Julie Delpy (Celine)
Charles Gunning (Angry Man in Jail)
Alex Jones (Man in Car with P.A.)
Carol Dawson (Coffee Shop Chatter)
Lisa Moore (Coffee Shop Chatter)
Steven Prince (Man in Bar)
Ken Webster (Bartender)
Adam Goldberg (One of Four Men)
Nicky Katt (One of Four Men)
Timothy 'Speed' Levitch (Himself)
Steven Soderbergh (Himself)
Richard Linklater (Pinball Playing Man)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 99m
u.s.
release: 10/19/01
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other richard
linklater films
reviewed on this website:
- the bad
news bears
- before
sunrise
(short
review)
- before
sunset
- the newton boys
- a scanner darkly
- school
of rock
- suburbia
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After a large and fortunately
forgettable misstep (1998's The Newton
Boys), Richard Linklater is back in fine form -- maybe
the finest yet. Waking Life, his inquisitive and phantasmagoric
new movie, is linked with his 1991 debut Slacker in that
it takes the viewer on an adventure of ideas and words. What's
new here is the pulsating look of the film; Linklater shot the
movie live-action, on digital video, and then handed it to animator
Bob Sabiston, whose shifting tones and textures give the actors
the appearance of (mostly) benevolent ghosts of the mind.
Read simply, the plot would
seem to concern an unnamed young man (played by Wiley Wiggins,
who was Linklater's surrogate in the director's 1993 nostalgia
trip Dazed and Confused) who isn't sure whether he's dreaming
or not. He moves from place to place, from person to person,
and hears a wide variety of concepts mostly having to do with
being and perception. Some of the talk is sort of academic and
dry; other talk strikes you as the kind of enthusiastic gush
you overhear at coffeehouses. (Sabiston's visual commentary sometimes
prankishly works against the philosophizing -- your eye is drawn
to a little figure in the background and you lose the thread
of what the speaker is saying, which in one or two cases may
be for the best. It may be intentional, or it may not.)
It's significant that the people
in Waking Life aren't just talking about banal, externalized
topics, though, because Linklater means us to see them all as
people who live in their own heads. It's debatable whether they're
all just living in the main character's head -- forgotten voices
from different places in his brain, unlocked by REM sleep. Linklater,
whose specialty is drama in miniature (Before
Sunrise, his romantic comedy from 1995, featured only
two people), may have pulled off his most audacious stunt yet:
despite the many characters, it could be argued that there is
only one character here -- Richard Linklater. The movie can be
taken and enjoyed as his dream, his invitation
to us to climb into his head for 99 minutes and see what's happening
in there.
Which is as good a definition
of art as any. The experiment is successful; leaving the theater,
you may wish for a light switch to flick on and off (one character
cites the act as a foolproof way to tell if you're dreaming or
not), and at certain points during the movie you may -- if you're
like me, anyway -- get that scary but exhilarating floating sensation
you sometimes get during lengthy philosophical chats, as if you'd
just left your physical self for a moment and connected with
some mass shared consciousness. Forgive me; the movie inspires
such daffy thoughts, and many more. Linklater bombards you with
other people's answers, hoping that they'll dislodge some of
your own or strengthen them; Waking Life, if nothing else,
is a heroic act of intellectual love married to the greatest
eye candy in years.
Would we want a steady diet
of movies that look and sound like this? Of course not; part
of what makes this experience so noteworthy is its rarity, and
I'd rather see this movie inspire other directors to make comparably
adventurous films than to make copies of it. (Linklater, who
has never really had a mainstream hit, has escaped the horror
of wannabe Dazed and Confused or Before Sunrise
ripoffs.) A true independent film that uses current animation
techniques to their utmost, Waking Life is off in its
own world, off in its own head; but Linklater, unlike other artists
who arrogantly don't care whether you connect with their work,
cares less about whether you connect with his movie than about
whether the movie leads you to connect with the world. Or at
least to connect with your dreams. By movie's end, you might
ask what the difference is.
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