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Although written nearly thirty years ago and ostensibly set seven years from now, Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly (via Richard Linklater) could play perfectly - totalitarianistically speaking of course - right smack dab in the the middle of today's world, with all its "war on terror", "God is vengeful", "take the red pill", status quo kind of daily bullshit we are buried beneath in the current anti-administration we call 2006 America. Perhaps in Dick's 1977 novel of a big brother-esque society there is more than a modicum of anti-establishment rhetoric, but you would never know it by watching Linklater's shimmer-over-substance animation folly version of said rhetoric.
Unfortunately, Linklater's film, which made its debut to standing ovations and thunderous applause by clap-happy critics and moviegoers alike at last month's Cannes Film Festival (a thing that makes me think I am standing all alone here), plays out, instead of as the rabble-rousing think-piece work it should be, as a rather shallow, moderately entertaining, little jig of a movie from a filmmaker who's uneven, but respectable, career path has already brought us both the sublime (Before Sunset) and the simple-minded (School of Rock) - now we are dismally trapped somewhere in the middle of the two.
Headed up by Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder, two of the blandest actors working today (proof that, no matter what Johnny Depp and Nicole Kidman may otherwise refute, beauty and talent do not always mix well) and looking like some sort of beautifully delicious perpetually oozing palette, Linklater's film itself oozes back and forth between near-pulchritude and a sad nowheresville tedium. Like Waking Life before it, A Scanner Darkly looks marvelously dreamy yet falls flat as a mute songbird once we get past all the pretty pictures and flashy trails and begin to listen to the drivel hidden between the acid-trip visuals.
Interspersed with a handful of waking-from-our-senses belly laughs - Rory Cochrane (Slater from Linklater's American Grafitti'd grand opera of teenage wasteland, Dazed and Confused) doing his best hallucinatory bugs-are-eating-me-alive wiggle and dance behind the opening credits and Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson's inane argument over a possibly stolen bicycle - A Scanner Darkly does have its moments after all, and in fact Robert Downey Jr.'s performance here is one of his best ever (can an animated actor get an Oscar nomination?), but sadly enough, when all is said and done, and all the balls, blings, buzzes and bumpers are put away for the night, Linklater leaves us with something that never quite goes boldly where no one has gone before.
-June 12, 2006
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