Scanner Darkly, A

A Scanner Darkly is one of the best novels about drug addiction and psychosis ever written. Philip K Dick was a master of mundane yet alternate realities which transformed themselves before your eyes. The power of his words endures and remains the source for many Hollywood films, Minority Report, Blade Runner and Total Recall among them. A Scanner Darkly has been the holy grail of would-be adaptors of the author’s work however, with a long line of directors attached. From Terry Gilliam to Emma-Kate Croghan (no kidding!) many have tried to get their take on the material up on the silver screen. Finally we have Richard Linklater’s version, using the rotoscoped animation techniques pioneered on his intriguing but flawed Waking Life. The animation is interesting, but it isn’t consistent. Some scenes are beautifully rendered, while others are very basic. This could be taken as a stylistic choice, but if it is, it’s just annoying. The quality of some scenes just makes everything else seem bland and poorly done. Sadly that’s a good analogy for the film as a whole.

The performances are uniformly brilliant. Keanu Reeves is perfectly cast, as he was in The Matrix, as a cypher. His inability to act doesn’t affect the film as he is there to serve as a focal point for the reactions of others. Arctor is really just a pinball being beaten about, and Reeves does a good job of selling that disorientation. The film doesn’t work as Arctor begins to fragment into a split personality, but it makes the character live in other ways.  Robert Downey Jnr’s Barris is the highlight though. A drug-crazed paranoid psycho who is loquacious and persuasive. He’s both hysterical and disturbing, a dangerous man because he’s more perceptive than you would give him credit for.

Linklater wisely doesn’t push the science fictional aspects of the story, things like the scramble suit (a device that projects millions of different combinations of people on its surface to disguise the wearer) and holographic surveillance technologies. Instead, it focuses squarely on Bob and his friends. It’s a story about people, their paranoias and the sorry state of their lives. Most of the film is just following them about, listening to the tales of friends who have freaked out and fallen by the wayside, victims of the drug that’s destroying Arctor and America. The idea is pure genius; a cop investigating himself, slowly going mad as he is forced to be two people. The layers of meaning within this, society tearing itself apart in an attempt to bring life under control; the possibilities are immense, and that’s where the film falls over. It wants to get into the descent, but it can never push itself into that space. Establishing Arctor as a cypher rather than a character is the main problem, but the difficulty of visualising a descent into madness like this is also to blame. The film feels like it’s afraid, or uncertain of how to show this downward spiral and there’s something about a film running up against its own limitations in this way that is extremely frustrating. The scenes happen too quickly, and don’t quite gel for me. However, with that said, it does redeem itself in its final sequences. The sense of loss and devastation mixed with pyrrhic victory is effectively conveyed and make the final moments worth the frustration of the missed opportunities that ran before it.

For any fan of Dick’s book, this is a very flawed film. But just because it fails the book doesn’t have to mean it fails as a film. A Scanner Darkly isn’t all it could be, but it’s still an interesting tale.

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