Beyond the Multiplex

"A Scanner Darkly": A Philip K. Dick adaptation or a moody sequel to "Slacker"? Linklater's latest animated film is both
When I met Richard Linklater a few weeks ago in Cannes, I suggested to him that his forthcoming ensemble drama "Fast Food Nation," adapted from Eric Schlosser's nonfiction bestseller, was a movie for the American people -- but "A Scanner Darkly" was a movie for his people. He laughed, but he's either too shrewd a self-marketer or too guileless (or both) to bite on a line like that.

Linklater insists that all his films, even cheerful, big-budget studio productions like "School of Rock" or "The Bad News Bears," feel personal to him. I can't dispute that, but I want to insist on some kind of distinction. Let's put it this way: "A Scanner Darkly," a mesmerizing dark comedy adapted from Philip K. Dick's story, using the same combination of live-action footage and rotoscope animation that Linklater employed in "Waking Life," will have particular resonance for viewers of about his age and generational predilections. If "Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused" were major cultural events in your life (along with, say, "Repo Man" and "Stranger Than Paradise" and "Blue Velvet" and "Sid and Nancy"), then this movie is for you.

The discovery Linklater made in "Waking Life" was that you could have the eye-candy appeal and imagination-stretching flexibility of animation without losing the immediacy and individuality of real actors, and the cast he assembles here is a treat. Keanu Reeves stars as Bob Arctor, a hipster deadbeat with a house full of degenerate friends who spends his work days in an identity-masking shape-shifter suit (I can't describe this in words, but it's highly cool) as a government narcotics agent, trying to stop the spread of a mysterious intoxicant called Substance D.

This is Reeves in his gloomy, introspective, existential-hero mode, but he's beautifully balanced by Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson as his two moronic housemates, Jim Barris and Ernie Luckman. If you've ever lived in a household where large amounts of perception-altering substances were ingested on a daily basis (I'm including cheap weed and Budweiser), Barris and Luckman will seem hilariously and perhaps distressingly familiar. Downey's character is the know-it-all alpha male, fueled by conspiracy theory, misremembered high school physics and dramatic overestimates of his own competence. Harrelson's is the happy-go-lucky surf stoner, constantly uncertain where he is, who he is, or whether everybody else is getting the joke and he's not.

Throw in Winona Ryder, who gives an affecting performance as Arctor's mysterious almost-girlfriend and drug connection, and a classic Dick plot full of switchbacks, double-crosses and drug-induced hallucination, and you've got a strange brew that I found as full of passion, humor and tragedy as any so-called realistic film I've seen all year. Linklater is simultaneously paying tribute to the trashed slacker households of his youth and pointing out that all too easily they become paranoid and pathetic sleaze pits where self-involved young people throw away their lives.

"A Scanner Darkly" doesn't offer any obvious sound bites about the real world's anti-drug hysteria or our contemporary surveillance society, but its portrayal of American suburbia as a zone of physical decay, chemical addiction and ever more intrusive high-end technology could hardly seem more urgent. Arctor becomes incapable of telling whether he's making love to Ryder's character or someone else; he is ordered to spy on his best friends and betray them, only to discover that at least some of them have already betrayed him. Do these things result from widespread addiction to Substance D, or from the society that has made it necessary? And how do we tell the difference?

In its mode of Dickian paranoid gloom, "A Scanner Darkly" is among the darkest and loveliest movies you'll see this year. But I found it most effective as a depiction of sun-baked Southern California slackerdom run to seed, and that mode is both ironic and elegiac. I don't think Linklater is necessarily the best American director, but he does have a stylistic versatility and small-c catholicism that's utterly his own. There's no other filmmaker, living or dead, who could produce a futuristic sci-fi nightmare, a hipster comedy, a haunting film noir and a cartoon, all in the same movie.

"A Scanner Darkly" opens July 7 in major cities, with a wider national release to follow.

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