One of the many ironies abounding in Richard Linklater’s “A Scanner Darkly” is that the film’s futuristic characters are more human than the characters in most such sci-fi stories … despite being cartoons.
“Scanner” is an adaptation of a novel by Philip K. Dick, material marvelously well-suited to the animation style seen here. As in his pioneering 2001 feature “Waking Life,” Linklater first photographed the actors playing their scenes, then rotoscoped the images so that elements of color, light, movement (to say nothing of props and sets) could be added or messed around with.
In the opening scenes of “A Scanner Darkly,” we see the possibilities of this process. First up is a wild sequence of a guy (Rory Cochrane) deep in the throes of hallucinations produced by Substance D, a paranoia-inducing drug.
Then we meet an undercover agent in the drug war, who must wear a dazzling shape-shifting suit that changes his appearance every nanosecond or so. The scenes with this quick-morphing character alone are enough to justify the use of the animation.
The cop is played, under the suit, by Keanu Reeves. He’s being asked to spy on his own friends, who include a couple of crackpot housemates (Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson) and a reluctant girlfriend (Winona Ryder). But Reeves himself is affected by drugs, which makes everything we see open to question.
In fact, it wasn’t until after this film was over that I felt I’d figured out exactly what might be happening in plot terms. Which makes me curious about seeing it again, this time with a clearer sense of who’s who and what’s what.
But even the first time through, this film gives you the tingle of something fresh happening. The antics of Downey and Harrelson, especially, make you feel as though the movie has been hijacked and bent into some new shape.
The animation style conveys the facial expressions and movement of these actors. In other words, there’s no question we’re watching the inimitable Robert Downey Jr. with his tweaked manner and his rat-a-tat delivery, even if his face is “drawn.” And the following pun is really not intentional, but I can’t help noting that Keanu Reeves seems more animated here than in most of his live-action films – indeed, his performance is quite touching at times.
Linklater has ranged from the experiment of “Slacker” to the crowd-pleasing “School of Rock,” but his films have always questioned authority and promoted skepticism. “A Scanner Darkly” is close to the spirit of Philip K. Dick’s book (based on Dick’s own trials with drugs), but it fits into Linklater’s sardonic view of governments and systems that peer too closely into people’s lives.
The film is less an elegy for the toll of drug use than it is a complaint about paranoia sometimes being justified.
An animated Keanu Reeves stars in “A Scanner Darkly.”
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