A Scanner Darkly. (15.)
Directed by Richard Linklater.
Starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr, Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson and Rory Cochrane. Released on Blu-ray/ DVD/ Digital pack from Warners Premier Collection. 100 mins.
You may prefer Blade Runner and Minority Report, but Linklater's 2006 live action animation version of his autobiographical novel is surely the truest cinema translation of his work. It is perhaps up there with Cronenberg's version of JG Ballard's Crash as the finest adaptation of a difficult literary work – and I say that with the confidence of a man who has never actually read the book, but doesn't really feel the need to bother after seeing this.
Don’t go in expecting some frenzied piece of lunatic sci fi though – it’s head spinning but on a very slow cycle. While films like Total Recall and Paycheck used Dick’s ideas to give a wild twist to their big budget action narratives, Scanner is a somnambulant nightmare, taking place in a Californian suburban druggy milieu racked with fear and paranoia, and set seven years in the future in an America which has taken its Wars on Drugs and Terror to their illogical conclusions. It’s a narrative of slowly shifting certainties, blurred identities and smudged moralities.
The battle against the addictive hallucinogenic Substance D has been so divisive that now everybody is under surveillance all the time and everybody and anybody could be a user, a dealer, an informant or a narc, possibly all at the same time. This is such a divided society that even the two hemisphere of one character’s brain are set in opposition to each other. It’s a sunkissed Naked Lunch for slacker.
Linklater chose to shoot the film in a bizarre live action/ animation hybrid called interpolated rotoscoping. First the whole movie was shot conventionally on location with actors and then handed over to a team of computer types who took 15 months performing a process akin to painting by numbers.
That must've been quite a leap of faith for Linklater – to shoot a whole film and then hand it over to a bunch of people to draw all over it. (Well, maybe not That much of a leap – he had done the same thing six year earlier with his dream narrative Waking Life.) The method is superficially a little crude. To delineate shading, blotches appear on the actor’s skin and clothing, constantly shifting like clouds on a weather map or restless sweat patches. It’s the digital equivalent of the big black line that marked the extent of Fred and Barney’s stubble in the Flintstones.
But the practical and aesthetic gains are tremendous. Firstly, for a low budget movie that needs to slip a few wild visual images seamlessly into what is fundamentally a realistic visual scheme, it is perfect. It is also a perfect match for the material – what could be more K Dickian that the perversity of a live action animation? The effect is a both distracting and enhancing – it keeps you at a distances from the situation and yet makes you acutely aware of the humanity that is trapped beneath this canvass of animation. As a result it actually enhances the actor's performances. Ryder is better here than she’s been in a long time while Downey Jr is magnificently irritating and creepy (he often is these days, but this time he supposed to be.) Best of all though is Keanu. He’s always had a gift for doing lost and confused and here he gives real heart to the role of a man who’s been turned inside out. He may never have been better.
Richard Linklater is someone whose films I can go either way on, but he is clearly one of the good guys. He is as bold, as original and as ambitious as any film-maker working, but doesn't make a big thing of it. Though I didn't go for Boyhood, I wish he'd gotten his Oscar because overall he deserved it for being the most varied film maker in North America; plus you could guarantee that he wouldn't have allowed it to go to his head and derail his career.
When it came out over a decade ago I think I was a little conflicted on it, enthusiastic but with reservations. Now I think it is a superb film; unfortunately the intervening years have been kind to it, as they have been cruel on us. Its vision of a world where nobody believes the truth of their own eyes, where up is down, where freedom is prison, where people fixate on hidden conspiracies yet can't see what is right in front of them is an unrotoscoped reality.
Extras:
There's a commentary by Keanu Reeves, Linklater, Producer Tommy Pallota, K. Dick expert Jonathan Lethem and his daughter Isa Dick-Hackett, which is often rather rambling and unfocussed and doesn't offer up as many insights as you'd hope for. It is though recorded so that it doesn't entirely block out the soundtrack of the movie, so it is possible, with subtitles, to really watch the movie and listen to the commentary simultaneously.
There is also The Wight of the Line: Animation Tales, a short feature on how it was animated.
Directed by Richard Linklater.
Starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr, Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson and Rory Cochrane. Released on Blu-ray/ DVD/ Digital pack from Warners Premier Collection. 100 mins.
You may prefer Blade Runner and Minority Report, but Linklater's 2006 live action animation version of his autobiographical novel is surely the truest cinema translation of his work. It is perhaps up there with Cronenberg's version of JG Ballard's Crash as the finest adaptation of a difficult literary work – and I say that with the confidence of a man who has never actually read the book, but doesn't really feel the need to bother after seeing this.
Don’t go in expecting some frenzied piece of lunatic sci fi though – it’s head spinning but on a very slow cycle. While films like Total Recall and Paycheck used Dick’s ideas to give a wild twist to their big budget action narratives, Scanner is a somnambulant nightmare, taking place in a Californian suburban druggy milieu racked with fear and paranoia, and set seven years in the future in an America which has taken its Wars on Drugs and Terror to their illogical conclusions. It’s a narrative of slowly shifting certainties, blurred identities and smudged moralities.
The battle against the addictive hallucinogenic Substance D has been so divisive that now everybody is under surveillance all the time and everybody and anybody could be a user, a dealer, an informant or a narc, possibly all at the same time. This is such a divided society that even the two hemisphere of one character’s brain are set in opposition to each other. It’s a sunkissed Naked Lunch for slacker.
Linklater chose to shoot the film in a bizarre live action/ animation hybrid called interpolated rotoscoping. First the whole movie was shot conventionally on location with actors and then handed over to a team of computer types who took 15 months performing a process akin to painting by numbers.
That must've been quite a leap of faith for Linklater – to shoot a whole film and then hand it over to a bunch of people to draw all over it. (Well, maybe not That much of a leap – he had done the same thing six year earlier with his dream narrative Waking Life.) The method is superficially a little crude. To delineate shading, blotches appear on the actor’s skin and clothing, constantly shifting like clouds on a weather map or restless sweat patches. It’s the digital equivalent of the big black line that marked the extent of Fred and Barney’s stubble in the Flintstones.
But the practical and aesthetic gains are tremendous. Firstly, for a low budget movie that needs to slip a few wild visual images seamlessly into what is fundamentally a realistic visual scheme, it is perfect. It is also a perfect match for the material – what could be more K Dickian that the perversity of a live action animation? The effect is a both distracting and enhancing – it keeps you at a distances from the situation and yet makes you acutely aware of the humanity that is trapped beneath this canvass of animation. As a result it actually enhances the actor's performances. Ryder is better here than she’s been in a long time while Downey Jr is magnificently irritating and creepy (he often is these days, but this time he supposed to be.) Best of all though is Keanu. He’s always had a gift for doing lost and confused and here he gives real heart to the role of a man who’s been turned inside out. He may never have been better.
Richard Linklater is someone whose films I can go either way on, but he is clearly one of the good guys. He is as bold, as original and as ambitious as any film-maker working, but doesn't make a big thing of it. Though I didn't go for Boyhood, I wish he'd gotten his Oscar because overall he deserved it for being the most varied film maker in North America; plus you could guarantee that he wouldn't have allowed it to go to his head and derail his career.
When it came out over a decade ago I think I was a little conflicted on it, enthusiastic but with reservations. Now I think it is a superb film; unfortunately the intervening years have been kind to it, as they have been cruel on us. Its vision of a world where nobody believes the truth of their own eyes, where up is down, where freedom is prison, where people fixate on hidden conspiracies yet can't see what is right in front of them is an unrotoscoped reality.
Extras:
There's a commentary by Keanu Reeves, Linklater, Producer Tommy Pallota, K. Dick expert Jonathan Lethem and his daughter Isa Dick-Hackett, which is often rather rambling and unfocussed and doesn't offer up as many insights as you'd hope for. It is though recorded so that it doesn't entirely block out the soundtrack of the movie, so it is possible, with subtitles, to really watch the movie and listen to the commentary simultaneously.
There is also The Wight of the Line: Animation Tales, a short feature on how it was animated.
