| PARANOIA MAN IN CHEAP SH*T ROOM : Richard Linklater's 'A Scanner Darkly' [5/10] |
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| Sunday, 20 August 2006 | |
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No heebies, creepies or hallucinogenics It's the height of paranoia The Fall I've read well over a dozen novels by Philip K Dick - perhaps even 20 or so. Ubik, Time Out of Joint and the insanely hard-to-find Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike are my favourites, while I didn't much care for Mary and the Giant. A Scanner Darkly, however, I can barely recall - beyond its unforgettable aphid-hallucination opening and the notion of the 'scramble suit,' a high-tech means of identity concealment. Nevertheless, it's reckoned a "masterwork" by many, including Lawrence Sutin whose Dick biography Divine Invasions is very hard to fault (and will hopefully prove the source-text for the impending Dick biopic, with Paul Giamatti reportedly - and, great though the actor is, ill-advisedly - cast in the central role). Having sat through A Scanner Darkly the movie, directed and written by the tireless Richard Linklater, I'm actually less inclined to go back to the novel and give it another go. What I remember as a somewhat drab and uninvolving novel has become a somewhat drab and uninvolving movie - the plot simply isn't up to much, and while he's often piercingly prescient elsewhere, Dick's concerns here seem decidedly dated. It doesn't help that Linklater deploys a variation on the gimmicky 'rotoscope' animation technique he tried out in Waking Life (which, though not to everybody's tastes, I found much more original and stimulating) - a variation of which was used to much more dazzling, lively, ambitious, eyepopping, irreverent effect in the riotous Hungarian animation The District! (which may or may not obtain a UK release later in the year). Behind the painterly 'cells' this time we have big names such as Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr and Winona Ryder: the former cast because of ball-park similar roles in Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix, the latter seemingly as a nod to their well-chronicled brushes with the law. A Scanner Darkly is set in a paranoid future, "seven years from now," in which police surveillance has reached levels of Orwellian intrusiveness. Narks and narcs abound, undercover infiltration is the norm: which is how cop 'Fred' (Reeves) lives half his life as 'Robert Arctor', part of a druggy clique in suburban California whose lives revolve around the dreaded, hyper-addictive 'Substance D'. Because he wears the 'scramble-suit' in the office (the suit is one of the film's few unqualified successes), nobody knows that Arctor and Fred are the same person, and the latter eventually ends up being tasked with spying on the former. Look closely at Fred's blurrily protean features, however, and you'll frequently make out aspects of Reeves' distinctive physiognomy. Indeed, close inspection of Fred's boss 'Hank' also defuses what's supposed to be the picture's big rug-pulling, third-act twist: a twist which I'd managed to forget since reading the book, along with most of the rest of a plot which hinges on a very bog-standard kind of conspiracy-theory. What we're left with is a modishly paranoid, oppportunistically topical (addicts are referred to as "drug-terrorists"; someone exclaims that "the bigger this war gets, the more freedoms we lose!"), verbose exercise in trippy cultishness as Fred/Arctor suffers an ongoing psychic deterioration - to the point that he's informed he barely has "two brain cells" to rub together. There are some sharp observations and memorable lines here and there - most of them allotted to Downey Jr's untrustworthy motormouth ("You are constitutionally incapable of shutting the fuck up!!"), who at one point says that a pal proceeds "through life like a cat without whiskers, perpetually stuck behind the refrigerator." Elsewhere, the dialogue often tends to the self-consciously ponderous, especially when Fred/Arctor switches to Blade Runner-ish voice-over in the final third ("I saw death rising from the earth in one blue field,"), often accompanied by mournfully keening strings and featuring numerous tracks by gloom-meister extraordinaire Thom (Radiohead) Yorke. While such an approach is arguably of a piece with what is reckoned Dick's most downbeat and heartfelt novel (one which ends, like the film, with a roll-call of fallen 'comrades'), the cumulative effect is strangely alienating and monotonous. As anyone who's ever spent time around such people will attest, watching drug addicts is a numbingly dull experience: watching people watching drug addicts is, as the characters themselves might put it, a real downer. Neil Young 20th August, 2006 A SCANNER DARKLY : [5/10] : USA 2006 : Richard Linklater : 100 mins (BBFC timing) seen at Empire cinema, Gate complex, Newcastle (UK), 14th August 2006 - press show |
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