Richard Linklater tries awkwardly to just say no in
A Scanner Darkly
.
Many of us know someone who emerged from a youth of experimenting with mood-altering substances to become staunchly, perhaps militantly opposed to such behavior. We remember him as the life of the party, and even as we tell ourselves that this friend is probably going to live a longer, more productive life now that he's clean,
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secretly we probably feel the same way George W Bush's college pals must feel: Why did the guy who used to be so much fun have to turn into such a hectoring dork?
It's hard not to feel that sense of mourning in microcosm watching Richard Linklater's adaptation of Philip K Dick's novel
A Scanner Darkly
. While Linklater once said he's "not really a drug guy," he built his career on the kind of rambling, tripped-out discourse that drove
Slacker
and
Waking Life
. Indeed, what little plot there was in
Dazed and Confused
is built around the heroic decision of his high school football star protagonist not to give up smoking pot.
Yet here he is, opening a film with a character going through a drug-induced psychotic episode in which he imagines bugs emerging from his skin. And the character is played by none other than Rory Cochrane,
Dazed and Confused
's blissed-out stoner Slater. "This is Slater at his 20 year reunion," Linklater seems to be saying. "Not such a barrel of laughs now, is he?"
Fine, mock if you will the relevance of such subtext, but take a look at the way Linklater casts his supporting roles. There's Robert "Rehab on His Speed-Dial" Downey, Jr. as motor-mouthed addict Barris. And over there on the couch is hemp cheerleader Woody Harrelson as Luckman. One is a coincidence, two is dumb luck, but three is what these guys would call a conspiracy.
True,
A Scanner Darkly
isn't primarily about those characters. It's about a guy who's living a double-life as both an undercover Orange County narcotics cop code-named Fred and as a junkie named Robert Arctor (Keanu Reeves) who hangs with the aforementioned losers, chain-popping a designer hallucinogenic called Substance D. He's trying to find the supplier of his dealer/girlfriend Donna (Winona Ryder), before he loses his mind in the process.
Because
A Scanner Darkly
is a Philip K Dick creation, it wrestles with questions of identity familiar
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to anyone who has seen
Blade Runner
or
Total Recall
. A nifty creation called a "scramble suit" turns Fred/Arctor into a composite of a million different physical characteristics while he's in the office, an effective physical manifestation of his disintegrating mental state. The style of computer rotoscoped animation is more than a gimmick; it's a hypnotic visual entry point for an unsettling near-future.
Yet it's also unsettling watching Linklater try to wrestle this material into a message. Like Dick, Linklater seems to want us to see individual drug casualties as tragic victims rather than criminals. The film sets up a monolithic system that benefits both from creating addicts and from curing them, and a government that uses the excuse of a perpetual War on Drugs to justify the erosion of individual liberties. Yet he's also essentially identifying users as part of the problem. Whenever he appears to be warning us about The Man, Linklater gets so grim-faced and serious that he might as well be The Man himself.
And it's a damned shame.
A Scanner Darkly
is kind of a blast when it's just freestyling. The best moments find Downey and Harrelson hilariously riffing on everything from crooked bicycle salesmen to the niceties of assisting a choking victim. Linklater is trying so hard to make his film a relevant commentary on contemporary society that he doesn't even seem to notice that the guys who do the drugs are the ones you'd actually want to spend time with.
A Scanner Darkly
feels like a bad artistic fit-a "just say no" lesson from a guy who benefits from the entertainment value of saying yes.
