"A Scanner Darkly" is one big train-wreck of a movie, but at least it's a marvel to look at. Initially shot in live action, the film's 100 minutes of footage were subsequently slaved over by a team of animators who painstakingly colored in each frame, turning the movie's washed-out urban landscape into a startlingly realistic cartoon. The resulting images are composed of monochromatic planes that never quite blend, but instead slide together to create an alien visualization of reality that's nothing short of mesmerizing. If the film's arresting imagery had been put to the service of an equally compelling storyline, "A Scanner Darkly" would have been a masterpiece. Alas, the listless sci-fi psychodrama hiding beneath the visuals' liquid beauty reveals itself to be devastatingly mundane.
"A Scanner Darkly" is set in Orange County, the current Mecca of jaded pop cynicism, seven years from the present day. The filmmakers' vision of the future resembles what might've happened if George Orwell's "1984" was rewritten by Hunter S. Thompson; despite 24-hour covert police surveillance, 20 percent of the population is now addicted to an illegal narcotic called "Substance D." In addition to providing users with a garden-variety high, Substance D has the unfortunate side effect of causing multiple personality disorder. Such is the fate of Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves), a junkie who inhabits a decrepit condo with fellow stoners Luckman (Woody Harrelson) and Barris (Robert Downey Jr.). Now, here's where it gets sticky -- Bob is also Fred, a narcotics agent whose addiction to Substance D has split his personality in two. Fred is running an undercover surveillance operation on Bob, and seems only vaguely aware that the man he's observing is actually himself. Fred plants cameras in Bob's home, then sits in front of a computer screen and disaffectedly regards his double life as an addict.
To describe the plot of the movie is to imply that it has one, and if ever there was a film lacking in structural cohesion, it's "A Scanner Darkly." The tortuous story originally sprang from the pen of novelist Philip K. Dick; the novel was based on his own drug experiences, and is told in a first-person narrative that shares its protagonist's limited grasp on reality. The screenplay plays with the sort of meaningless futuristic jargon that I have come to dread in movies like this; what exactly did the screenwriters mean, for example, when they informed us that "everything lies just beneath the surface of our own reality?"
As I wandered through scene after disjointed scene, I took some comfort in my growing suspicion that the filmmakers didn't have any better idea of what was going on than I. But it was cold comfort indeed. This sort of digressive storytelling can only be tolerated up to a point before cranky viewers like myself start to look for little extras like plot or character development. In this respect, Fred/Bob acts as an emotional vacuum at the center of "A Scanner Darkly;" with his ever-shifting personae and drug-dulled demeanor, the character lacks that crucial entry point from which we can start to empathize with his fate. Reeves' performance seemed serviceable enough from what little I could make out beneath the animation, but he's playing a character so indistinct that he barely exists.
There is some relief to be found in the eccentricities of Bob's compatriots Luckman and Barris, aptly played by Harrelson and Downey as a sort of Cheech and Chong duo for the narcotic set. Not realizing that Fred and Bob are the same person, Barris rats out the latter to the former, providing a minor point of interest that drifts about amidst the otherwise plotless muddle of the film. Another briefly diverting thread exists in the form of Donna (Winona Ryder), a mysterious figure who acts as both a supplier of drugs and an object of unattainable lust for the three men. When Bob makes a pass at her, we sense a note of regret in her voice when she tells him, "I do a lot of coke, so I have to be careful not to let people touch me."
Without warning, the various lingering plot strands snap together in the final half-hour, and suddenly "A Scanner Darkly" goes from being about nothing to being about too much all at once. The left-field conclusion -- that everything is a massive conspiracy, or something like that -- doesn't carry the weight that it should, because it lacks any semblance of build-up, purpose or logic. In its final moments, the film reduces itself to the level of a crude anti-drug parable, yet even within those parameters the hallucinatory visual state through which the story is told undermines the strength of its message. The delusional world of "A Scanner Darkly" is so divorced from reality that any social commentary the film may be trying to make is buried within its own over-articulated sense of style.
Of course these criticisms will have little value for the intended audience of "A Scanner Darkly," that leather-clad, spike-collared portion of the teenage population who cheerfully embraced Keanu Reeves' anti-establishment paranoia in "The Matrix" and will embrace it again here. The film's bored cynicism will no doubt strike a chord with viewers who share its persuasion, but with such a combustible premise and such compelling imagery, it seems a shame to settle for inertia.
