A Scanner Darkly
Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
Fox Searchlight, 2006
By Doug Nayler
It looks like The Bad News Bears and School of Rock have done the trick. 2006 marked the release of two new films from Austin’s pride Mr. Richard Linklater, both adapted from books. Fast Food Nation, a fictional story-driven adaptation of the non-fiction non-story driven book. This summer saw the release of A Scanner Darkly, a take on the Philip K. Dick novel in the animation style of Waking Life, the filmmaker’s last work. Both Fast Food Nation A Scanner Darkly stand as proof that Linklater’s previous forays into family films (which were admittedly better than most of the genre) have financed the director’s ability to go back into the weird and rambly territory he’s most acclaimed for.
A Scanner Darkly explores a world of the not too distant future where recreational drug use and government surveillance have increased significantly. A super drug called Substance D is growing in popularity, to quote one of the characters, “Either you’re addicted, or you haven’t tried it”. At the center of all this sits Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves), a government intelligence agent who has a cover as a Substance D addict. He hangs out and does narcotics with his friends, and then analyzes the events later. However, Arctor soon loses track of where the cover ends and where his reality begins. The effects of the drugs result in his left and right brain hemispheres taking on separate identities that oppose one another. However, it’s long before this that the plot becomes so convoluted and abstract that it basically has to be given up on.
It is, however, encouraging to see an adaptation of Dick’s work that doesn’t cut out the author’s famous critical voice. When written in 1977 the book extrapolated the drug culture of the 1960s and the authoritarian bent of the hardly forgotten Nixon administration to their logical extremes. The most frightening thing of all is the fact that these observations seem more accurate today in the “post-9/11″ — how I hate that phrase — world than they did originally. But in his fervor to provide a faithful Dick adaptation Linklater seems to have lost track of certain things that work in print and not on film. One can assume that a film about altered perception will be disordered and disorienting. But A Scanner Darkly goes off on so many hazy tangents that all drama is lost. I figure that Reeves wooden, ambivalent performance as Bob Arctor is to blame as well. I can’t imagine someone being more apathetic to losing their mind.
I will close, however, by mentioning two things about the film which were very nicely done. The animation looks fantastic. It was achieved by shooting the film on video, editing it together, and then animating over each individual frame digitally. The process has come a long way since last used in 2001’s Waking Life. It is much more fluid and precise, thereby creating a strange visual hybrid which is not quite real but not quite animated either. It suits the tone of the film so well that there’s no question of it simply being “a gimmick.”
The best scenes of the movie can be found in the exchanges between two of the supporting characters, James Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) and Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson). Downey’s frantically articulate performance steals the show and Harrelson serves as the perfect foil. And I for one am encouraged to see that Downey’s career has recovered to the point that he can now play a drug addict without it being an awkward, ironic ordeal.
