A Scanner Darkly is the second film by Richard Linklater to use an animation method in which live-action footage is painted over, as it were, by artists, yielding visual effects uncommon in live-action film. Linklater's first picture made with this computer-driven variant of rotoscoping was 2001's Waking Life, a rambling, oneiric adventure in which the rotoscoping presented a dizzying, dazzling array of visual styles that more often than not made optical rhymes with whatever scenarios, characters, or philosophical conundrums were involved in a given sequence. Although it seems paradoxical to say so (this is an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel, after all), A Scanner Darkly is far more linear and grounded. Which isn't to say it lacks for visual mind-blowers.
Scanner's protagonist, one "Bob Arctor" (whose name I put in quotes because, as those familiar with the novel and Dick's works in general will concur, I really have no choice) is a narc of the "future" who, to conceal his undercover identity, goes around much of the time wearing a scramble suit, a sort of second skin that displays an ever-shifting variety of faces, clothes, body characteristics—a complete scrambler of identity, and a perfect metaphor for the bind in which "Arctor" (played by Keanu Reeves) ends up. As for this narc's undercover identity, he's an unshaven slacker sharing house space with two other drugged-out no-lifers, Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) and Luckman (Woody Harrelson), and having a desultory romance with his sometime dealer Donna (Winona Ryder).
"Arctor," who once had a nice middle-class life with a wife and kids and everything, is supposedly leading this squalid existence in order to bust open a drug ring, but he keeps going around in circles at the end of the same cul-de-sac. Who is he, really, and who are his friends, really, and what is he doing, really, and who are his bosses, really? In a quintessentially Dickian mode, these question nag and nag and nag, and the more that comes to light, the more frustratingly they nag, until finally the one going around in circles is plucked out of that cul-de-sac and into a fresher hell.
There's something mildly quaint about Dick's story today, seeing that it concerns a subculture whose aim in ingesting substances—organic, narcotic, or chemically engineered—was genuine consciousness expansion, rather than the manufacture of a buzz to accompany a night of clubbing or video-game playing or what have you. The idea was using drugs to open the doors of perception, in the Blake phrase that was adopted by both Aldous Huxley and Jim Morrison. Many of the explorers of this realm did not know just what a tinderbox they were playing in, and A Scanner Darkly is ultimately Dick's elegy for fallen comrades-in-arms. Linklater's adaptation (and the work of his fully in-tune cast) honors that vision fully. The most impressive thing about the film's technical wizardry is, finally, how unimpressive it is. One doesn't leave the movie with a mind blown by visual bedazzlement but with a soul shattered by the profound sense of tragedy Linklater and company so beautifully put across.
Copyright © 2008 Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc.