‘A Scanner Darkly’ introduces brilliance, fails to follow through

Endless cycles of paranoia abound in Richard Linklater’s “A Scanner Darkly,” appropriate considering that its source is Philip K. Dick, the king of dystopian futures.

We are presented with a seemingly typical “1984” scenario in which the government has installed innumerable cameras—the scanners, of course—to watch over every citizen with an unblinking eye, ready to arrest anyone at a moment’s notice. The problem is that our cast of characters is a bunch of layabout idiots and conspiracy theorists, mumbling incoherently in between drug-induced delusions, leaving us to wonder: is everything as it seems to be?

The film’s disturbing “rotoscoping” process—filming in live action and “tracing over” every frame of it in CGI animation—is not only fascinating (images unnaturally contort and scrape against one another), it’s necessary, if only to force us to question the nature of reality as it exists here. In this sense, watching “A Scanner Darkly” through to its end is an endlessly tragic affair—if only the film could follow through with the brilliant ideas that it introduces!

The drug-induced delusions that inhabit the world of “Scanner,” set seven years into our future, are courtesy of Substance D, a powerful hallucinogen that boasts a fifth of the world’s population as addicts. The U.S. government has announced its intention to crack down on the source; Agent “Fred” (Keanu Reeves) is just one member of a squadron of code-named narcs dressed in “scramble suits” which alter the wearer’s appearance into a constantly morphing mishmash of clothes and facial features. Theoretically anonymous, Fred has been assigned to monitor D-dealer Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder) and her beau Bob Arctor in hopes that they will lead him to her suppliers. The only problem is that Fred is Arctor—and addicted to Substance D.

Under the influence of D, Arctor’s roommates Ernie (Woody Harrelson), James (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Freck (Rory Cochrane) spend their days popping pills and mumbling about how everyone’s out to get them: someone has sold them a bicycle with “fewer speeds” than advertised, or a car’s brakes fail at just the wrong moment. These scenes are superficially hilarious (especially with tweaked-out Harrelson clashing against Downey’s faux-intellectual), but there’s so much more to it. “It’s not really paranoia if they’re really after you,” goes the old saying, but isn’t it really? There’s a subtle, sinister comfort to the characters’ drugged-out ramblings, which keeps them paralyzed in stupors of fear and ignorance, incapable of doing anything about what they perceive.

Essentially, if we are to accept the Big Brother implications that Dick and Linklater have tossed us into, “A Scanner Darkly” becomes a condemnation of the people who actually have an inkling of the reality, only to remain content within their paranoid perceptions. Questions abound: If thrown into a totalitarian society, would we recognize it? Or would we ignore it in a haze of half-baked theory and fear of the very concept of oppression? Have we already?

Fascinating concepts, but while the film rides on its brilliant theories for a good hour, it finally falls into its own comfortable niche, and in a horrible, contradictory turn, treats the whole of it as a purely linear series of events. The first half of the film has forced us to play out innumerable scenarios of reality versus fantasy. Then the film throws in what it intends to be unforeseen plot twists, many of which we have guessed long ago. The problem is that “A Scanner Darkly” has introduced a subjective world, appropriately without answers; when it starts bringing answers into the equation, it seems forced.

What the filmmakers hoped to accomplish by this is beyond me—perhaps they were afraid that not enough people would get it, and tacked on a few obvious life lessons so that everybody would. But in sacrificing the subtext, they also cheapen the text: “Scanner” becomes a simple cautionary tale about drugs, a simplistic mindtrip meant to convey how such substances can destroy lives. Agreeable, but in light of everything that the film has offered us up until this point, it seems to ignore the far-reaching implications of its own scenario. In this sense, then, perhaps “A Scanner Darkly” is best viewed as a mere leaping point to greater philosophies within the viewer, something that gets the mental cogs a-spinnin’ so that you may come to your own conclusions. Admirable, despite the unfortunate, unavoidable fact that it betrays its own sensibilities by its end.