Ill-Informed Gadfly

Well, that was frustrating. I suppose I’ll have to see it again, although its partisans will have to argue eloquently to persuade me it’s worth my while. Why? Because for long stretches of “A Scanner Darkly,” I had to fight to prevent myself from nodding off. I didn’t always succeed, although I don’t think I was out for more than a few seconds at a time.

It was a 10 p.m. show at the end of a day with plenty of activity, but mostly of the stress-free variety. I certainly had no inkling that I wouldn’t be able to stay awake through a movie in the theater. And I think, had it been a better movie, there wouldn’t have been a problem. But the combination of the animation, the wispy plot and the rambling, tangential dialogue was too much to overcome. Impressively realized as it was, much of the time I felt like I was staring at a big talky void, and my mind would begin to wander, and my eyelids would start to get heavy and … huh? What? Did I miss something? Maybe. But then … probably not.

From what I can tell, Richard Linklater’s misfire here was in his choice of material — a story by Philip K. Dick. To me, it amounts to little more than garden-variety drug-culture paranoia. Linklater probably thought it translated well to the days of government-sanctioned illegal wiretapping, but the movie doesn’t have nearly the expansive vision needed to carry off big ideas with any authority. It’s about an undercover cop who uses a drug called Substance D as he spies on his loopy friends who also use the drug. They talk a lot, and they scheme, and they hallucinate sometimes, and that’s about it. It’s not nearly as masturbatory as Linklater’s “Waking Life,” his first movie to use the “rotoscoping” process (in which live-action footage is, in effect, painted over digitally to make it look animated). Since that 2001 film, the process has been co-opted, amusingly enough, for a series of Charles Schwab commercials.

Linklater justifies the technique when the cops are wearing “scramble suits,” which cycle constantly through an endless array of faces and bodies, rendering the wearer impossible to identify. It’s a disquieting vision, and on the whole the movie looks really cool. But, ultimately, who cares?