Scanner Darkly, A (2006)

Director Richard Linklater shot A Scanner Darkly – from a futuristic Philip K. Dick novel well suited to the striking visual dreamscape – with live actors and then computer-painted over them. The process, called Rotoscoping, took more than 500 hours to create a single minute of footage.

Take the scramble suit worn by Keanu Reeves as Bob Arctor, an undercover narc. The suit turns Bob into a walking hologram so that no one can get a fix on his identity, including his pal Freck (Rory Cochrane), who gets the creepy-crawlies when he imagines bugs invading his body.

It’s a hallucination of dumbness. despair, desertion and death brought on by the aptly named ‘Substance D’, the drug du jour in Bob’s California hood.

Also hooked are Luckman and Barris, two hyperarticulate slackers who share Bob’s Anaheim abode. They are played, respectively, and to the manner born, by Woody Harrelson and, in the film’s flashiest and most ferociously entertaining performance, Robert Downey Jr.

Bob has gone so far undercover that he’s worse than the addicts he’s spying on, to the point of bedding Donna (Winona Ryder), a dealer with an endless supply.

Dick wrote Scanner in 1977, but the theme of Big Brother surveillance has a this-just-in urgency for the Dubya era, and Linklater evokes everything from film noir to the great paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, notably The Parallax View (1974).

Linklater’s screenplay is far more convoluted than it needs to be, though, disorienting audiences when they should be focused on Bob’s psychological meltdown.

The breaking point is hit when he becomes the prime suspect in his own sting.

The scene in which Barris rats on Bob, not knowing he’s talking to Bob himself – there’s that scramble suit again – encapsulates the moral lines that blur when government fights duplicity with a greater duplicity.

Bob Arctor
Keanu Reeves
Charles Freck
Rory Cochrane
James Barris
Robert Downey Jr.
Ernie Luckman
Woody Harrelson
Donna Hawthorne
Winona Ryder
Connie
Lisa Marie Newmyer
Donald
Marco Perella
Mike
Dameon Clarke
Brown Bear Lodge Host
Mitch Baker

Director
Richard Linklater

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