Reality, drug fog blur in 'Scanner'

Viewer can feel the effects in 'rotoscope' addiction drama

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, July 14, 2006

If you've ever wondered what it's like to be caught in a web of drugs and paranoia, you can find out watching A Scanner Darkly, director Richard Linklater's adaptation of a 1977 Philip K. Dick novel.

The movie doesn't so much involve you in a story as it invades your mind, creating a world ruled by anxiety and suspicion. Perhaps with an eye on the present, Linklater also emphasizes invasion-of-privacy issues: The government observes the lives of addicts and big-time dealers (also known as drug terrorists) with omnipresent monitoring devices.

A Scanner Darkly is a conspiratorial mood piece. To make it, Linklater employed a technique called rotoscoping. Actors work in real locations. Each frame is then painted so that the actors appear as animated versions of themselves.

Linklater used the same technique in the more meditative Waking Life. Here, everything feels a shade short of natural. Sometimes, the images appear to be almost photographic; at other times, they look like artists' renderings in a graphic novel.

We're in the near future, a time when most of the junkies of Orange County, Calif., have become addicted to a brain-damaging chemical called Substance D. To penetrate the drug life, an undercover cop, Keanu Reeves' Robert Arctor, lives with a couple of junkies played by Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson.

Downey's Barris slips into crazy rants, all delivered with an intensely persuasive energy that, perhaps because of the animation, can look like self-parody. Harrelson's Luckman provides comic relief. Both of them buy drugs from Donna (Winona Ryder), a woman who keeps everyone's "D" habit percolating. Scenes in Arctor's house proceed in a drug-induced fog that's right out of the '60s.

Barris and Luckman share the house with Arctor, who - when he's at police headquarters - wears something called a "scramble suit." It changes his appearance and protects his identity, a conceit that provides Linklater with an opportunity to create a shifting series of images that make a mockery of identity.

The plot contains some familiar elements. For example, Arctor becomes too involved in his work, developing his own addiction to Substance D. Lines between hallucination and reality constantly blur. That's the druggie's curse: The junkie may be walking the same streets as the rest of us, but he's lost.

And at times, the movie feels that way, too, caught in some strange, aimless drift. Animated or real, hanging out with junkies doesn't make for the most compelling experience, and the plot sometimes feels as if it, too, has nodded off.

A Scanner Darkly probably means to be a cautionary tale - about government surveillance under the guise of doing good, about the dangers of mind-bending drugs and about the way drugs breed an environment of double-dealing and betrayal. The whole thing comes off as a kind of experiment that operates in the same way as Substance D. It's as if Linklater wants the movie to seep into our heads.

Whether he leaves anything of lasting value behind is questionable, but for almost two hours, he pulls us into a world in which nearly all the characters have lost their moorings. The ending isn't without a glimmer of hope, but that hope feels almost out of reach - just like the strange, pulsating images that give the movie its flavor.