Flak Magazine: Review of A Scanner Darkly, 07.20.06

It takes a film like A Scanner Darkly to make one realize how relatively little is still being done with cinema. A hundred and some years into the medium and too many of the movies are either filmed stage plays or funhouse rides for children and stoners. But Richard Linklater, in his adaptation of Philip K. Dick's best novel, has dreamed very large and succeeded phenomenally. He's brought us a moving, hilarious, horrific vision of a very near future that promises to grow out of today's headlines, and, by turbo-charging the visuals, made a thing of beauty, diabolical intelligence and more subversive fun than the law will soon allow.

Most fans of Dick's 1977 book, Through A Scanner Darkly, were probably not eager to see it filmed. It's an intensely claustrophobic story about a narc who infiltrates a small circle of drug burnouts in hopes of worming his way up the food chain to their suppliers and perhaps to the kingpins of the Substance D business. Substance D — or "Death," as it's called by its enthusiasts — is a universally addictive designer drug that holds users in its thrall until they're brain-damaged and/or forcibly rehabbed by New Path, the Hazelden of the future. The D-addicted narc periodically goes off to the police station where, his undercover identity protected in an electronic "scramble suit," he watches his housemates through "scanners," video bugs planted around their home. Everybody in the circle goes madder by the day, including the narc, unhinged by not only the drugs, but also by surveilling himself on videotape, and by the utter isolation of his predicament.

Until very recently, it seemed almost impossible to visually suggest the world Dick describes, even with today's prodigious CGI capabilities. But last spring, when the trailers started showing for A Scanner Darkly many fans of the novel were stunned. The "internets" lit up. Linklater had decided to cast the story as animation, using rotoscope animation as the foundation for the same electronic "water-coloring" of film he'd used in 2001 for Waking Life. In that film it seemed a gimmicky distraction, but in Scanner it perfectly captures the D-addict's world of global hallucination, and at the same time leavens, with its sometimes Disneyesque colors, the mordantly dystopian world of Anaheim "seven years from now."

The rotoscoping actually gives Scanner many different looks, shifting keys from scene to scene. Sometimes it's Speed Racer primitive, sometimes just a light scrim over the photographic, and sometimes it's thoroughly painterly, asshimmeringly beautiful as the Lucy in the Sky from Yellow Submarine. On a big screen the comic-book effect becomes a Roy Lichtenstein tableau vivant. and the famous faces in the cast get a Warholian make-over.

The faces assembled for this project are themselves integral to its brilliance, bringing as they do prodigious talents and also many extra resonances. Robert Downey, Jr. delivers an addict's deadpan prediction of neurological catastrophe that gains spin and morbid humor from the actor's well-known drug history. Likewise, it's smart casting when your beautiful, drug-dealing head case love interest allows a direct allusion to all those "Free Winona" T-shirts. Woody Harrelson brings a bit of Cheers, Natural Born Killers and his advocacy for recreational weed to his brand of burnout. Keanu Reeves works brilliantly as the down-spiraling narc; his blankness is perfect for the character who isn't even aware of the Matrix he's plugged into here.

A Scanner Darkly includes some images of almost unbearable ugliness, and the animation actually makes them more intense and more subjective, putting us somehow inside the delirium of the sufferer. Fortunately, these are mostly just fleeting set-up for a lot of comic relief. Linklater proved in his early masterpieces (Slackers, Dazed and Confused) that he has a great ear for hare-brained patter, for the type of soliloquy and dialectic that is rigidly reasonable, just daft in its basic premises, and here he returns to that strength. There are plenty of ensemble skits, full of very cerebral druggy humor, as if Cheech and Chong had teamed up with Tom Stoppard. (Fearless prediction: Linklater will win Best Adapted Screenplay this year.) In the most emblematic of these, Harrelson's animated avatar tells his fellow couch potatoes how somebody has gotten rich and famous by impersonating a brilliant impostor, having based his impersonation on "that guy who DiCaprio played before he went all Elvis." Talk about shifting frames of reference, layers of "reality!" Note how this fiction within the fiction ends with reference to a real impostor, a real movie, a real actor and a real drugged-out paranoid. And it comes off naturally, like casual joke.

Still, Scanner requires its very dark moments to be something more than an amusing trifle. With paradoxical realism, it's set in a world of limitless, invisible police powers, where anyone can be bugged, scanned, tapped, entrapped, etc., in the context of an endless war on "drug terrorism." It's hard to tell the bad guys from the paranoia, and even the best intentioned believe, creepily, that God is on their side and working mysteriously through their very necessary evil. In an early scene the narc dons his scramble-suit and propagandizes for the war at a dinner for the Brown Bears Lodge. Halfway through the speech he jumps the track, starts saying things he really means, and some unseen Karl Rove-ian minder orders him, via radio implant to stick to the prepared text. The whole setup, with our privileged view of the Nobody inside the narc's suit, depicts with an intimacy usually confined to literature a man's losing battle for his soul.

The narc never quite gets back on track, but anyway the Brown Bears don't much notice — good, polite Americans, they just want to eat. As the scramble-suit stalks off one gets a smothering sense of doom, a sense that indeed, as the poster's tagline has it, "Everything will not be okay." Let's hope there will be consolations like this film along the way, that we can at least laugh and wonder as it all swirls down the tube.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)