I had no plans to watch A Scanner Darkly this past weekend, but I wanted something to put up while at the same time working ahead on the Stacker Challenge. I knew my next film to watch there was a bit depressing, especially since I had seen it before, so I wanted something that was more or less the opposite of that. I actually found A Scanner Darkly on YouTube without looking too hard, and I have been rather curious about it for quite some time. Basically, it was an easy choice.
Granted, it’s also more than a little depressing, but it’s also trippy. Trippy helps.
A Scanner Darkly is a rotoscoped animated feature from director Richard Linklater. That basically means the movie was shot on digital and then animation was drawn over that footage, and even though the animation can and does allow the film to show stuff that might be either very expensive special effects or downright impossible, it also means that the main characters, as played by well-known actors, do look more or less exactly like the characters they’re playing. Regardless, the movie is set in the future where the United States is looking at an epidemic of drug addiction. 20% or so of the population is addicted to a hallucinogenic drug called Substance D. Undercover cops wear special suits on duty, suits that shift and change to different faces and clothes constantly while disguising their voices, allowing all of these cops to stay completely anonymous while on duty, even to each other.
That would be where the cop known as “Fred’ (Keanu Reeves) has gone undercover as Bob Arctor, possibly his real name. He’s sharing a house with Substance D user James Barris (Robert Downey Jr) and hopeless addict Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson). He also seems to have a thing for a dealer named Donna (Winona Ryder), a frequent guest at the house, but he and his superiors are looking to use Barris to work their way up the ladder. Or said superiors are really suspicious of Arctor because they don’t know he’s an undercover cop. Factor in as well that Arctor is addicted to Substance D himself, and it may only be a matter of time before something comes down on him.
I suppose the first thing to comment on is the animation. It’s nearly photorealistic for faces, but the odd coloring and the occasional visions that Substance D causes, to say nothing of how those shift suits the cops wear to maintain their anonymity, does give the movie a rather appropriate trippy feel. I found it mildly disorienting, but that was almost certainly expected, so I can go along with that. It adds effectively to the disorientation and the general paranoia many of the characters seem to be feeling.
That said, the movie is ultimately about how Bob/Fred is put into a bad position by his very job. He’s actually ordered to investigate himself, something that should arguably be impossible, but because the other cops don’t know what he really looks like or who else might be working the case, all while he is taking the very highly addictive drug that he’s investigating in order to maintain his cover, it’s really a catch-22 sort of move. The drug is bad news for just about anyone who takes it, but the fact that he’s supposed to blend in with these guys while either not taking the drug or doing what he can to get off it immediately if he does, all while wondering if he has a family somewhere and why Donna seems to flirt back but always draws a line before they can really get anywhere romantically, so to speak, it’s just a rather tragic story where Bob may or may not be able to do the very job he’s required to do because his brain is so scrambled in the end he might not even remember what he’s supposed to be doing. Oh, and no one cares. No wonder this version of America seems to have lost the War on Drugs.
Grade: B+
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