Unsettling 'Scanner' tends to lose its way

Friday, July 7, 2006

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE P-I

Richard Linklater sets his adaptation of cult science-fiction author (and longtime junkie) Philip K. Dick's 1977 novel in a surveillance society "seven years from now," where the government has eyes and ears on everyone (except the corporate Big Brother who provides the surveillance) and narcotics agents are guerrilla fighters in a failed drug war turned addiction epidemic.

MOVIE REVIEW

A SCANNER DARKLY

DIRECTOR: Richard Linklater

CAST: Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder

RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes

RATING: R for drug and sexual content, language and a brief violent image

GRADE: B

LINKS/TRAILERS
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To capture the drug-induced paranoia and social disconnection, Linklater uses a technique called interpolated rotoscoping, a kind of low-tech motion capture he first used in "Waking Life." After the actors are filmed, animators digitally trace, paint and rework the raw footage into sketchy images that throb with a free-floating impermanence.

Keanu Reeves is under the digital paintbrush as Agent Fred, a drug enforcement agent burnout in a suit that smears his "real" identity into a vague, shifting Everyperson and an addict of the mind-scrambling super-drug Substance D, which he pops like pep pills.

Studying surveillance tapes of meaningless, incoherent conversations between Bob Arctor (aka himself) and his reality dropout roommates, conspiracy-theory-spinning Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) and brain-fried Luckman (Woody Harrelson), Agent Fred turns downright schizophrenic as he fingers himself and his sort-of girlfriend, Donna (Winona Ryder), as his prime suspects.

Linklater can't quite embrace the complete resignation to conspiratorial corruption of the novel -- he has to pull out some hope -- and the results are not exactly emotionally involving. Like the hazy characters themselves, we lose the thread of the story in the distracted, mind-numbing diversions that become these dysfunctional characters' entire lives.

But the film is weirdly fascinating in its own maverick way. The undulating, morphing animation creates a state of flux and a fragile, drug-addled perspective, and Linklater's portrait of the empty lives of dead-end social floaters and the mental breakdown of longtime addicts is unsettlingly underplayed.

The atmosphere of schizophrenia, paranoia and disconnection from reality is the most faithful screen adaptation of Dick's sensibility to date. While it may not make for gripping drama, the nervous disorientation makes it hard to shake the experience loose.

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