Waking Life
Written and directed by Richard Linklater
Fox Searchlight
2001
Rating:


"How many of you out there are on drugs?" director Richard Linklater asked the audience when "Waking Life" debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. When a number of hands went up, he added, "Good. This is for you. The rest of you, just bear with me." Linklater's fresh and innovative creation legitimately earns the title of the most mind-altering cinematic experience since Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" astonished audiences in 1968.

"Waking Life" follows 53 characters in search of answers to the mysteries of life as they float through surreal dreamscapes and philosophical rhapsodies. Wiley Wiggins (perhaps reprising the role of Mitch Kramer from Linklater's "Dazed and Confused") leads the journey like the slacker generation's Candide, conversing with savants and intellectual midgets alike about what it means to live, dream and be free.

The relatively plotless film is entirely driven by Linklater's thought-provoking dialogue, sharing much in common with his debut, "Slacker," Louis Malle's "My Dinner with Andre" and James Toback's "The Big Bang." A young girl tells a playmate that "Dream is destiny." Robert C. Solomon, Linklater's professor at the University of Texas, says that "Your life is yours to create…we can't write ourselves off as the victims of various forces." An old man ponders, "Which is the most universal human characteristic, fear or laziness?" And another professor reveals that truly powerful films can capture "the holy moment" as film critic Andrι Bazin once said, a record of "the everlasting face of God."

Linklater presents his free-floating philosophies with psychedelic images. The director first shot "Waking Life" on digital video with real actors, then used computer animation to digitally paint over them in a process termed "interpolated rotoscoping" by animation director Bob Sabiston. The approach could've been a cheap gimmick to mask a 97-minute philosophy lecture, but the resplendent, anchorless animation is the perfect backdrop for a meditation on dreams and reality.

"Waking Life" can only be described as a visionary masterpiece, a rare moment when style and substance coalesce, forming a piece of cinema truly unlike anything you have ever seen.

Posted Saturday, July 30, 2005

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/waking.life