The late Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction stories inspired “Blade Runner,” “Minority Report” and “Total Recall.” Now the prolific writer-director Richard Linklater is adding to the list with the computer-animated “A Scanner Darkly,” based on Dick’s futuristic 1977 novel about a narc dealing with an identity crisis.
Unfortunately, Linklater makes many of the same adaptation mistakes that recently plagued “The Da Vinci Code.” Talky, obtuse and almost devoid of narrative momentum, his movie tries so hard to stay faithful to the book that it doesn’t function on its own terms.
Casting is also a big problem. In the leading role(s), playing a character who has two different names (Fred and Arctor) and many identities, Keanu Reeves can barely establish one personality. In the production notes, Reeves claims that “while I was playing Arctor I learned about Fred, and when I was playing Fred I learned a bit about Arctor. They both feel differently about themselves internally. There were days where it was confusing...”
Tell us about it. Wearing a “scramble suit” that theoretically can give him more than a million separate identities (it’s christened “the ultimate Everyman”), Fred/Arctor drifts through the movie as if no alternatives were available to him.
He comes off as just another of Reeves’ stoic sleepwalkers. His failure to connect is made all the more frustrating by the livewire performances of Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson as Fred/Arctor’s drugged-out roommates, Barris and Luckman.
It’s tempting to recast the movie while you’re watching it. What would Downey have done in the Reeves role, which has the potential for so many colors? Surely Harrelson would have found more energy and vulnerability in the character. Even Rory Cochrane, cast as a drug casualty named Freck, would almost certainly have brought more conviction to the central role.
The movie opens with a Freck freakout that lands it somewhere between “Naked Lunch” and Cheech and Chong. He’s so convinced that spiders and beetles are crawling over his skin that he blasts insecticide all over his body. In just a few minutes, Cochrane establishes a style of hallucinatory humor that’s quite winning. Downey picks up on it and runs with it, as does Harrelson.
Less captivating are Winona Ryder as Fred/Arctor’s bland girlfriend, Donna — and the script’s attempts to say something about links between terrorism and the war on drugs. The story takes place “seven years from now,” when 20 per cent of the population is hooked on hard drugs, including a lethal item called Substance D.
Filmed in the same computer-animation style as Linklater’s charming “Waking Life” (2001), “A Scanner Darkly” was shot first as a live-action feature, then transformed over a 15-month period by animators using the rotoscoping method. At least this gives the movie a visual variety it would otherwise lack.
The “scramble suit,” a shape-shifting contraption that provides Reeves with many faces, bodies and clothing changes, is almost worth the price of admission. Too bad it’s wasted in a movie that doesn’t know how to show it off.