Serious play: brilliant result

This most faithful rendition on film of a Philip K. Dick story (of eight so far), adapted at an earlier stage by the brilliant Charlie Kaufman, is both Richard Linklater's homage to Dick and Dick's homage to himself, his wife, and his friends who were brought down by drugs. Sporting a fine cast whose members themselves have excellent drug credentials, A Scanner Darkly moves from the sheer wonder or tsk-tsking of tales like Jonas Åkerlund's Spun or Arnovsky's Requiem for a Dream toward the supply-demand-punishment nexus relentlessly limned by William S. Burroughs.

Burroughs' sexually outrageous phantasmagorias have seemed unfilmable (though Cronenberg gave Naked Lunch a good try), but his ideas are clear: the future moves toward totalitarianism, and drugs are an excellent way of controlling masses of people. If they're addicted, they're your slaves; you've got their minds, and you've got their money. If you've got them hooked on something illegal, you've got a nation of outlaws, and hence a police state. But as Burroughs said, it's covert -- though America's huge prison population is increasingly visible. The world becomes one big sting operation. In A Scanner Darkly, the rulers conceal and rip up identities at will and in the end nobody's safe, but everybody's too wacked-out to care. Except we care, and the movie is trippy, funny -- but also sad.

Linklater ingeniously uses rotoscoping (found also in the director's Waking Life and a segment of Von Trier's Five Obstructions), a complicated computer imaging technique that gives filmed people an overlay of shaky hand-drawn-looking animation -- or, in this case, a crazy web of drug-induced (or governmentally imposed) illusion hovering on the surface of everybody's appearance.

Darkly's set seven years in the future, but the images are rich sunbleached-drab Seventies Orange County grunge. Dick's story is as much rueful reflection as sci-fi. It's also comedy, as drug stories often are are, the manic nuttiness embodied in Rory Cochrane as Freck, who imagines himself covered with bugs (rotoscoped all over him); Robert Downey, Jr. (who surely knows whereof he speaks) as the motor-mouthed, jumpy, manipulative hophead Barris; and goofy loose canon Luckman (Woody Harrelson), who might get violent or pass out any minute, you don't know which. These represent Dick's immediate circle of trusted friends. Or they were trusted. Now addiction to big red pills of an amphetamine-like super drug called Substance D (evidently produced by the same encompassing structure of exploiters that hunts down its sellers and users, whom it infiltrates) has turned them manic and paranoid. The system is eating its tail: the war on drugs is part of the drug business. "The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer," Bill Burroughs said, "he sells the consumer to the product." The matrix feeds equally well in all directions. People are bugs stuck in the honey-pot.

Exploiter and victim at the center is Matrix alumnus Keanu Reeves as Bob Arctor -- friend, doper, and covert agent for the company -- whom however the company is seeking to destroy. He hangs out with his friends and then goes to work and watches scanner images of himself with them. No wonder he knows less and less who he is. Even the corporation he works for doesn't know, though it increasingly suspects, which one of the household he's watching on the scanner he is. Agents of the corporate system that binds the nexus together, such as Arctor, "Fred" to the company, wear a shape-shifting "scramble suit" coating when meeting with their bosses that hides their identity from everyone by making them assume dozens of fractional identities every minute, changing outfit, face, and sex with the flickerings of the rotoscope images. But the flickerings on the people all the time show their heightened but fragmented perception and the splitting of their identities. They're pretending to be who they don't know they are. Luckman tells about a famous impostor who decided the best scam would be to pretend to be a famous impostor. The world of Scanner Darkly is like your mind on drugs such as marijuana: you struggle to grasp an idea and when you've almost got it, you forget what it was you were struggling to grasp. The movie captures that -- more than once.

Its look is trippy, and though less spectacular than some, this is one of the greatest drug movies, not only because of the intense visuals but because the Dick of this story and Linklater himself are both master delineators of drug thought and drug talk. As in Spun, linear logic or tidy structure would be inappropriate. The movie is episodic and just ends. Highlights are Barris'/Downey's conversation and the friends argumentative analysis of situations when a bike is found, or a car breaks down on the highway. Dick and Linklater capture the hilarity of drugged friends comically bonding at cross purposes with each other, their bicker/banter. But, not atypically for far-along druggies, there's no sex: Donna (Winona Ryder) can't bear for her boyfriend Arctor to touch her -- even though Reeves has never looksed so handsome as he does unshaven and rotoscoped. "Fred" (Arctor) is periodically hauled in for testing. They know he's addicted to the stuff he's supposed to be investigating and can see the two hemispheres of his brain aren't working properly any more. It may be Arctor signifies a man at war with his inner Addict.

Some reviewers complained about press screening walkouts or inability to follow, but the San Francisco third day audience was warmly appreciative. Dangling abrupt ending? Perhaps, but the key to the treasure is the treasure: getting there is half the fun. Linklater fans, of whom I'm one, must not miss this movie, and it's not just idle play. Nor is it coincidental this came out at Cannes with his other film, Fast Food Nation. Both are calls to arms that speak to twenty-first-century America. The food industry, the war on drugs, the war on terror are all means of exploitation and repression. Dick's nonsensical word play and Linklater's current filmmaking are dead serious, and world-class American art.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.