SCREEN SCENE: "A Scanner Darkly"
By Daily Bruin Staff
July 2, 2006 9:00 p.m.
“A Scanner Darkly” Directed by Richard
Linklater Warner Independent Pictures
Long before the suburban Orange County of color-saturated
beachfront mansions and high school hook-ups flounced across
primetime television, acclaimed science fiction novelist Philip K.
Dick told of an “OC” much less welcoming. The suburban
future of “A Scanner Darkly” is futile and paranoid.
Big Brother is watching. The bugs are biting. It is surreal and
unreal, a shadow of life growing from a garden of death
(literally). Unenthusiastic undercover cop Bob Archter (Keanu
Reeves) has been hired to spy on his closest friends. When he
reports back to his superiors, each dressed in a nifty holographic
suit designed to necessarily hide the identities of those inside,
Archter is asked to increase surveillance for ““ of all people
““ himself. Trapped between shifting identities and the bane
of American peace, an addictive terrorist drug called Substance D,
Archter’s simple existence becomes more and more absurd.
Director and writer Richard Linklater opted to capture this surreal
tone through an animation technique he developed with the 2001 film
“Waking Life.” “Rotoscoping” allows
animators to paint over live-action footage as a painter would
paint on canvas, connecting fluid lines across frames and creating
life-like human movement. And the 500 hours spent animating each
minute of the film is no less than awe-inspiring. Though Linklater
stumbles over his own toes in terms of plot, and even in terms of
the political significance of the film’s terrorist and
governmental parallelisms, the “cool” factor stems from
an unwavering dedication to a visual medium. Even then,
“Scanner” is all talk. The plot has twists, loops and
holes, but the philosophy of the film conveyed through its
awkwardly, but so rightly, eloquent characters is flawless. Though
we pine for the possibilities of Hollywood action via this
seemingly unlimited visual technology, the film works perfectly as
a series of conversations. Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder) and Ernie
Luckman (Woody Harrelson) hide depth in superficiality, but it is
Jim Barris, played spot-on by Robert Downey Jr., who is so
faultlessly, darkly hysterical. While Dick’s novels have
inspired such futuristic adventures as Ridley Scott’s
“Blade Runner” and Steven Spielberg’s
“Minority Report,” this truly mind-bending adaptation
of Dick’s 1977 masterpiece is destined to claim its own place
as a cult classic. – Devon Dickau
E-mail Dickau at [email protected].
