A Scanner Darkly
Review by Fritz Esker
Anyone who wants to see me publicly humiliate myself should stop by Zeitgeist Performing Arts Center (1724 O.C. Haley) and watch me do improv with ComedySportz Nola. A Lady in the Water review should be up Tuesday or Wednesday of next week.
A Scanner Darkly is Richard Linklater's (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise) second film using rotoscoping, an animation technique that, to put it as simply as possible, paints over actors and backgrounds. In reality, this process is actually far more complicated and time consuming, but that is the gist of it.
Linklater uses the technique in his adaptation of a Philip K. Dick (he wrote the stories Blade Runner and Minority Report were adapted from) novel about drug abuse. Taking place seven years in the future, Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is an undercover cop investigating the underworld of Substance D, a new, highly potent drug. Only a very small amount of people know that Reeves is actually a police officer. When he is at the police station, he wears a body suit that blurs his features. Even his superior officer does not know his real identity. As a result, one of his superiors asks him to investigate himself. While all this is happening, Reeves finds himself more and more addicted to Substance D (which he has had to take so those he investigates will take him seriously).
All of this may sound confusing, and it gets that way at times. However, the film is not as plot-heavy as it sounds, choosing instead to focus more on the personal toll the charade takes on Reeves. Like the best movies of the past about people who assume unsavory roles for the greater good (Mother Night, Donnie Brasco), A Scanner Darkly focuses on Reeves' slow transformation into the kind of person he would normally arrest. Linklater fills his film with other questions about the war on drugs, the failure of society to help addicts, and the government's infringement on civil liberties.
Quality-wise, A Scanner Darkly reminds me a lot of Blade Runner, perhaps the most notable Dick adaptation. While some regard Blade Runner as a classic, I would put it in the "good, but not great" category. It is uneven and erratic for most of its running time, with parts that alternately brilliant and dull, but it does pull together for a strong conclusion (and no, I don't mean the tacked-on happy ending to the original version). Despite the fact that A Scanner Darkly often teeters on the brink of incoherence, it pulls itself together nicely for a compelling wrap-up. After the film's story concludes, Linklater posts Dick's epitaph to the novel on the screen, in which the author (formerly an addict) listed the names of all of his friends who either died prematurely or suffered permanent psychosis as a result of drug use. The list offers a sobering personal reminder of the costs of addiction while reminding us that drug addicts are human beings, not faceless thugs who must be fought and defeated.
Reeves can be a feast or famine actor, but he does solid work here, as does most of the cast. Every time Robert Downey Jr.'s character appeared on screen, I wanted to knee him in the balls, but the character is supposed to be annoying, so that means that Downey did his job.
All in all, the parts of this film are sometimes greater than the whole, but it is still nice to see a challenging, thought-provoking effort from a high-echelon director in the midst of summer blockbuster season.