palewire

In his adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly,” the director Richard Linklater has made a considerable achievement simply by conjuring images otherworldly enough to suit Dick’s arrhythmic work. By recasting reality in an eerie, hallucinogenic haze, Linklater has set the stage perfectly to play out Dick’s dark vision of a not-too-distant future where drug addiction and the technology of the police state have overtaken American society.

It was all done using a technique called rotoscoping. After a scene is shot with a conventional camera, the stock is loaded onto a computer where graphic artists create animations by tracing over the footage. In the days before computers, a projection machine — named, of course, the rotoscope — projected live footage onto a screen for the animator to trace by hand. Back then its primary use came as a reference tool, an aid for animators to help simulate complex movements like Prince Charming’s dance steps in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Linklater caught a lot of attention five years ago when he put the new digital version of the technique (the software is called Rotoshop) to use in his film Waking Life. His animators did more than just another trace job, instead splashing Linklater’s shots onto their digital canvas and morphing the mundane everyday into a fluid dreamscape where our narrator’s fantasies and longings could seamlessly float alongside his very lifelike movements.

Sadly, the frontier Waking Life opened has gone largely unexplored. Maybe the stoner philosophy at its center obscured the film’s achievements, or maybe other people don’t see the form’s potential as I do, but, for whatever reason, Linklater’s use of animation’s dazzling new vocabulary failed to inspire other directors to try and say something serious; the only significant followers coming from the world of advertising, where a brokerage house and an automotive company picked up on the technique to give their products a fresh, eye-catching look.

But, for all its sheen, Linklater’s animation turns out to be just as dependent on his characters as his best conventional work (Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset), which, for all its visual verisimilitude, has always hinged success on the ability of his actors to connect with the audience’s empathy and compassion. As engaged and entranced as we might be by the hynopotic visual lure of Linklater’s images, they remain, tragically, centered on the image of one Keanu Reeves, a man with all the emotive range and timbre of a slightly overcooked brisket. While he certainly succeeds in emitting the abundance of one-liners Linklater’s script provides with his signature quzzical grunt, sometimes even a well-delivered “Whoa!” just isn’t enough, as the Matrix sequels and whole string of vapid romantic comedies have certainly proved.

Instead the film belongs to the supporting cast, especially Robert Downey Jr., whose heady performance as the paranoid drugdealer Barris thrills with its tempering of Hunter S. Thompson’s addled-yet-poised diction with Downey’s own cool California arrogance. It’s a shame that he and his fellow costars do not play a more central role. This is particularly the case with Rory Cochrane, who turns in a wild-eyed performance as an out-of-control addict. His early scenes, especially those in interaction with Downey, spark with a energy utterly lacking in Reeves, whose performance can be summed up by the many unimaginative and tedious reverse shots of his inert visage. The same lament should be made for Winona Ryder, who surprises by managing to express more of the confusion, despair and ambivalence meant to suffuse the screen’s every pixel in one scene than her leading man can in 100 minutes. Whoa, indeed.