REVIEWS
A SCANNER DARKLY
“Director: Richard Linklater; Starring: Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder
review written by David G. Stone
Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly is celebrated and genius, but I didn’t understand a thing of it until the very end. The Richard Linklater directed adaptation of the novel is much the same, except while reading the book is like peeking into an LSD user’s mind, watching the movie is like being force fed some sort of drug; at least with the book you can put it down and walk away, with the movie there’s nowhere to go.
The plot is extremely simple when you untangle it: in a future when a deadly drug – Substance D – is rapidly taking over Southern California, undercover cop Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is assigned to monitor himself after an anonymous tip, and at the same time the undercover Bob and the cop Bob are splitting personalities.
The movie presents it just as the book says it though, in a back and forth jumble of unrelated scenes that only manage to explain the situation when a character at the end of the film speaks it.
The film is really little more than a series of inconsequential scenes in which the characters are sitting around complaining about their world. There are the occasional scenes in which Fred (Bob Arctor in a scramble suit, a nifty piece of future technology that camouflages its user) meets with his boss Hank (another scramble suit) at the Police headquarters, or where Bob Arctor is surveying himself on the cameras hidden in his house, but for the most part there is little plot involved at all.
For those who are familiar with Linklater’s movies, the animation used in Darkly – rotoscoping – is an advancement from Waking Life, and while it serves to enhance the illusion of the movie being a weird drug trip it’s also difficult to watch and left me with a decent headache.
The future presented in A Scanner Darkly is by far the bleakest and most familiar of any of his stories, and hardcore fans of films based on his work may be disappointed at the lack of a technological presence in the film.
It drawls, and it drawls, but then so did the book, and so many people love it – myself included – so there are some things to like about Darkly.
Watch for the reading of Charles Freck’s (Rory Cochrane) sins. Or the conversation about how many gears a bicycle has. Or when Jim Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) makes cocaine.
Then there’s the acting. Robert Downey Jr. is too perfect as the creepy Jim Barris who always has an ulterior motive, and Woody Harrelson is spot on as Ernie Luckman, while Keanu Reeves seems comfortable in playing someone who is losing braincells and doesn’t know what’s going on.
The biggest drawback of this adaptation might be that it is too loyal to its source, with almost everything that happens in the movie coming straight out of the book word for word, leaving little room for a cinematic embellishment on the story.
If you want to see this, be prepared to need a second showing.
As Keanu Reeves would say: Whoah, dude.
