15, 100 mins
The stories of the late Philip K. Dick, a dark literary visionary sometimes disguised as a prolific pulp science-fiction writer, have inspired such films as Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report. Yet Hollywood has tended to turn Dick’s work upside down and drained out the dread, then slapped a macho star on the poster and called it a day.
That’s not the case with Richard Linklater’s version of Dick’s 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly. Yet like the story’s protagonist, the film suffers from an identity crisis. It’s faithful to Dick’s original about the horrors of drug abuse, Orwellian state control and rampant paranoia, but it’s also very much a Linklater film. Those two qualities don’t always connect.
Keanu Reeves stars as Fred, a California undercover cop in a near-future dystopia marred by rampant addiction and Big Brother spycraft. Fred’s cover ID is Bob Arctor, a Substance D (for death) junkie whose friends include a coke dealer (Winona Ryder), a flop-haired burnout (Woody Harrelson) and a conspiracy nut (Robert Downey Jr, chattering like an agitated chimp). When Fred is assigned to monitor Arctor — ie, himself — the overlap in identity and the brain- splitting effects of Substance D send him into a tailspin.
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The film then becomes a Mobius strip of bizarre, sometimes amusing, psychological dilemmas. Linklater, as a post-9/11 film-maker, is also hip to the parallels between the late-Sixties vibe of Dick’s story and our era. He sees echoes of today in the portrayals of dead-end lives and covert spying, of flights from reality and outlaw subcultures.
Linklater also adopts a technique he used for his philosophical daydream, Waking Life, in which live action has been overlaid with squiggly, shimmering animation. This allows the film not only to conjure up one of Dick’s classic identity-warping devices — the “scramble suit”, a psychedelic, constantly morphing electronic disguise that could take Joseph’s Technicolor dreamcoat to the cleaners — but also to suggest the characters’ drug-altered realities and the distortions of fear.
Yet the film ultimately lacks a cohesive impact. While Dick is a pessimist, Linklater is not. He is the writer-director of two great contemporary romances, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, as well as Slacker, a wry look at dropout culture. His outsiders are likeable, hopeful optimists, still confident that life has possibility, despite all evidence to the contrary (think of Jack Black in The School of Rock). He favours entertaining dialogue over the deeper implications of Dick’s mind-rattling plot and lets the cast play light and loose with material that should bristle with anxiety.
Reeves, whose best work tends to be in sci-fi stories in which his blankness registers as a kind of broken humanity, is a suitably clueless soul. The other performances entertain when they’re not bordering on self-parody as Linklater indulges in extended stoner conversations. But like any addict’s story, the film can also be boring and sad. But by doing what he does best, Linklater dilutes the intensity of Dick’s novel and, despite adopting the author’s coda listing his drug-casualty friends, also lessens its anguished cry over narcotics.
IAN JOHNS