A Scanner Darkly
Written and directed by Richard Linklater
Warner Independent
2006
Rating:


"A Scanner Darkly" shares the hallucinatory, rotoscoping technique of "Waking Life", but where director Richard Linklater used the dreamy images of animation drawn over real actors for stoner philosophizing in that film — indeed, Linklater even encouraged the audience to light up at a Sundance screening — here Linklater is more interested in exposing how easily lives can be lost to drugs.

No mere "Just Say No" campaign, "A Scanner Darkly," based on Philip K. Dick's novel, has a plot that outdoes "Infernal Affairs" and "The Departed" for existentialist detective work. An undercover agent known only as Fred (Keanu Reeves) to his bureau has infiltrated a group of addicts who use the deadly narcotic Substance D and he's assigned to bring down their dealer. Shrouded in a "scramble suit" that shields his identity even from the other agents he works with, Fred ends up being assigned to investigate his undercover persona Bob Arctor, who's suspected of being a drug kingpin. He spends his days as Bob getting stoned with paranoid Barris (a highly animated Robert Downey Jr.) and hilarious Luckman (Woody Harrelson) only to later watch how he spent his day on the bureau's surveillance scanner. As Bob gets in deeper and deeper, the combination of a double life and Substance D slowly erodes his personality, leaving Fred to hope that the scanner sees his life clearly, not darkly. During one of his reports to his superiors about Bob, Fred says, "I'd say Arctor is doomed if he's up to something. And I have a hunch from what you're saying that he is." Bob's only tentative connection to reality is through Donna (Winona Ryder), though intimacy is thwarted by her use of cocaine.

Linklater skillfully places this near-future tale, set "seven years from now," into a real context. Bob's stoner pad isn't a technological den but a ranch house with an American flag on the ceiling and bumper stickers on the walls. "A Scanner Darkly," like such other great drug movies as "Trainspotting," explores the allure of drugs, especially in Barris and Luckman's slacker tκte-ΰ-tκtes. The underside of drug use hits home in Freck ("Dazed and Confused's" Rory Cochrane), a character who's initially played for laughs in his hallucinations of insects but who eventually becomes one of the film's most tragic figures.

And tragedy looms large in "A Scanner Darkly." In the end Bob finds himself in a field of blue flowers, a symbol of romanticism, youth and the unknowable. His gentle picking of that flower is overwhelming in the discovery that for Bob, chimera is the only thing left he can grasp.

Posted Saturday, January 20, 2007

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http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/scanner.darkly