Richard Linklater Delivers An Intriguing Trip With A Scanner Darkly

Richard Linklater's primary focus as a filmmaker has been making quiet meditations on how mundane moments of life shape us as people in the long-term. This wistful kind of storytelling has served him extremely well in delivering such outstanding features as Boyhood or any of the three Before movies. But over the course of his career Linklater has stepped out of that comfort zone to deliver delightful family comedies (School of Rock), remarkable Coen Brothers-esque dark comedies (Bernie) and even acclaimed period piece romantic dramas (Me and Orson Welles). But perhaps his biggest stretch outside of Boyhood-type projects is A Scanner Darkly, an animated adaptation of Phillip K. Dick's novel of the same name.


Whereas Linklater's most famous features tend to emphasize normalcy heavily, A Scanner Darkly is a near-future science-fiction tale that utilizes the medium of animation to realize all kinds of stylized imagery. Linklater fully embraces doing an unorthodox type of paranoid sci-fi thriller with A Scanner Darkly and it results in something truly unusual and interesting. This story takes place in the near future with a drug known as Substance D ravaging the country. Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is an undercover government agent, suited up in a high-tech cloaking device whenever he's not in undercover duty, whose primary mission is to get close to drug dealers Luckman (Woody Harrelson) and Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) and eventually snuff them out.

Over the course of A Scanner Darkly, Bob Arctor grows to realize that his superiors, who supposedly have the best interests of American citizens at heart, are more dastardly than expected while Bob's own growing infatuation with fellow drug dealer Donna (Winona Ryder) further complicates matters. Though the story is considerably more over-the-top than, say, Dazed and Confused, A Scanner Darkly still maintains Richard Linklater's infatuation with wall-to-wall dialogue. This time around, the dialogue isn't meant to capture the experiences of young love or melancholy over losing a loved one but rather the persistently paranoid psyches of the lead characters.

Much of A Scanner Darkly centers on just these lead characters, especially Barris, engaging in conversations that seem thinking they've cracked the code on what kind of larger conspiracies are controlling the world in a humorous fashion only to gradually realize that they really don't have a clue what's actually going on. Robert Downey Jr. especially excels with this kind of speedy dialogue informed by a misplaced sense of assuredness. His line deliveries make it believable that Barris would be convinced by his own BS while Downey Jr. also got me laughing pretty frequently whenever he portrays Barris trying to maintain that confident attitude in the face of his theories blowing up in his face. The only real problem with hinging heavily on this dialogue style is that it frequently leaves Keanu Reeves just being the straight man to the ramblings of supporting characters. Brief flashback scenes for the Bob Arctor character that switch over to a more restrained form of dialogue certainly give Keanu Reeves some powerful material to work with but it'd be great if there was even more of that.

Anxiety-ridden dialogue exchanges, as well as other individual sequences of A Scanner Darkly, are rife with dark comedy, but Linklater's script doesn't ease up on the grim parts of Dick's original story about the U.S. government's flawed approach to drug-related epidemic that has only gotten more relevant since it was originally published in 1977. Recognizing how the tale still resonates in the 21st-century, Linklater's 2006 film A Scanner Darkly really leans into the darker tone of certain parts of the story. This approach is especially evident in the final ten minutes that take Bob Arctor down a dehumanizing path that, alongside some final on-screen text taken from Dick's source material, hits you right in the gut.

The various tonal fluctuations of A Scanner Darkly are all told through a rotoscoping form of hand-drawn animation that lends an uneasy visual sensibility to the film that feels fitting for the story it's telling. Every character in A Scanner Darkly looks slightly askew, an effective (whether intentional or not) visual reflection of how the world Bob Actor inhabits is always off-kilter. Less successful is any of the times hand-drawn animation is meant to interact with fully CGI items like an upside-down wagon in Actor's front yard, the dissonance between the two forms of animation feels too jarring to be intentional, not to mention that CGI and hand-drawn animation not working together well was a problem faced by many hand-drawn animated features in the mid-2000s. Even with that caveat, the animation style of A Scanner Darkly is still quite a trip to watch. The movie itself isn't as mind-blowing as other Linklater directorial efforts but that kind of distinctive animation is just one of the numerous ways it still stands out as a contemplative science-fiction yarn.