>> PREVIEW
A SCANNER DARKLY
STARRING Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr.
DIRECTED BY Richard Linklater
Opens Friday, July 14
Uptown Screen
Substance D fries your synapses, sucks out your willpower and turns you into a gibbering paranoiac. But at least it won’t leave you hurting for company, as long as you don’t mind hanging with nutso motormouths, a narc who doesn’t realize he’s informing on himself and other folks who are animated in every sense of the word.
The summer’s grimiest and savviest instant cult movie, A Scanner Darkly, is a feature-length cartoon that’s more punk than Pixar in its sensibility. Shot on digital video and then given a hallucinatory quality by the same rotoscope animation techniques that the director used in his 2001 phenomenology primer, Waking Life, Richard Linklater’s adaptation fully captures the mind-bending properties of Philip K. Dick’s dystopic story about drug addiction and state-sponsored surveillance.
As the filmmaker explains during an interview at the Cannes film festival in May (where he also presented the premiere of Fast Food Nation, out this fall), animation was a natural choice for such a whacked-out tale.
"The way the viewer takes it in is analogous to what the characters are going through," says Linklater. "If you’re looking to have an emotional impact on your audience, I think this animation is the best way to feel the characters and the story. There’s a kind of dissonance created as your brain tries to process it. You think, ‘Is this real? It seems real.’ But it’s obviously not real at the same time. It’s similar to Bob Arctor’s bilateral dysfunction."
Played by Keanu Reeves (who previously entered this terrain in the highly Dick-ian Matrix trilogy), Bob is an undercover cop in a near-future America in which 20 per cent of the population is addicted to D. He conducts surveillance on a trio of addicts (played by Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Dazed & Confused’s Rory Cochrane), Bob’s kinda-girlfriend Donna (Winona Ryder) and, most disturbingly, himself. Naturally, Bob’s worsening addiction plays havoc with his investigative skills.
One of the most satisfying of the many Philip K. Dick adaptations since Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly boasts a formidable density of ideas and a fundamental sense of instability. While playing fast and loose with the viewer’s perceptions, Linklater does something more subversive by drawing a parallel between the era in which the book was originally written and America’s current climate of fear.
"This whole movie didn’t really get going until after 9/11," says Linklater. "You could see the writing on the wall when the Patriot Act came in. The book came out of the era of Nixon and COINTELPRO (the FBI’s counter intelligence program against American radical groups), and Philip K. Dick saw very clearly how governments and quasi-governmental corporations with a lot of power could abuse that, and how that could affect the individual and set you against your friends. In the ’60s, so many groups had been infiltrated – they’d find out later someone there was a plant. Now if you’re in an eco-activist group or a PETA-type organization, anybody who’s trying to do anything, they’re kind of back to those methods. This whole terror thing we’re living in creates a sad, suspicious atmosphere."
In Linklater’s view, Dick’s story is as relevant as it was 30 years ago, noting that any citizen who bucks the system may attract its wrath. "Enemy combatants all!" he cracks, only half in jest.
Reeves says he, too, connected with A Scanner Darkly’s "ideas about surveillance and losing personal freedoms," though for him, Dick’s focus is "not so much political" and "more social." Showing off his level of PKD fandom, he cites as another example of this Dick’s 1964 novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. "His stories can be not obvious, but grand," says Reeves, deploying his sometimes idiosyncratic syntax.
"In that book, the guy is just trying to be a salesman. Then all of a sudden, he is implicated in something that seems to get bigger and bigger. Yet it’s still about this man who’s gotta go to work and is just trying to do the best he can and his family – the frustrations and hopes and ambitions are all there."
Reeves’s performance as Bob is similarly grounded in anxieties that remain familiar despite the character’s increasingly-bizarre circumstances. Though Bob chiefly functions as straight man to his more manic cohorts – especially Downey’s Jim Barris, a conspiracy theorist untroubled by the constraints of logic – Reeves gives the movie a much-needed emotional core, thereby preventing form from trumping content.
"I’m really pleased with how the animation feels," says Reeves. "If you relate to it, it can be a pretty haunting, melancholic film and I thought the animation served the performers well."
Just as the animation enhances the intensity of the live-action performances, Linklater’s film is strengthened by its hybridization of tones and genres.
"It sort of challenges you to see it on various levels," says the director. "The movie demands to be taken as a comedy, certainly. It also demands to be seen as a drama, and ultimately it heads toward total tragedy. It’s several stories on top of one another."
His star admits it might also strike a chord with viewers who adopt a similar mental state as the characters. "I’m sure it has a lot that would be enjoyable for someone who is stoned," he says sagely. "Hopefully it will not be marginalized or described as: ‘it’s for them.’ I hope people don’t do that." |
Copyright ©2006 FFWD. All rights reserved.