Waking Life
dir. Richard Linklater
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Waking Life is unlike any film you've ever seen. Using
a process called rotoscoping, director Richard Linklater shot digital video and
then animated it, giving the film a half-live, half-cartoon quality, a bit like a
color version of A-ha's video for "Take on Me."
It's so remarkable, in fact, that
it's hard to pay attention to what's going on in the rest of the film — the old
sawhorse categories like plot, dialogue and acting.
Because each scene in the movie is animated by a different artist, bound by a loosely
defined set of standards to maintain continuity, Waking Life holds your attention
even at its slowest points. In some scenes, faces expand and contract as in a funhouse
mirror; in others, background
animation like explosions and blowing clouds accentuate the dialogue. Some scenes
are very close to their original form; others are almost completely cartoons. All
of them, though, have a flat, washed-out tone, like an animated Alex Katz
painting.
The film, which won Linklater the best director medal at the Cannes International
Film Festival (along with Joel Coen), revolves around an unnamed young man's
emergent lucidity within a dream. Most of the first hour is a series of talking-head
monologues, with a few well-known actors (Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke) and a lot
of lesser-knowns expounding on highbrow topics like evolution and technology, truth
and existentialism. The scenes are set in classrooms and dens, bedrooms and coffee
shops. The scenes don't follow any logical order, but are disjointed and jumpy,
cutting from one to the next without forewarning or context. The character, played
by Wiley Wiggins, floats from place to place, picking up clues and slowly realizing
things are not what they seem.
For all its deep points, though, Linklater pays the price in didacticism — were it
not for the stunning animation, the film's first hour would be absolutely
unbearable. Forced to listen to countless talking heads expound on, say, the
relationship between the soul and genetics is enlightening, but it's the kind of
experience only a philosophy grad student could call a good time.
What makes the dialogues work, though, is the way Linklater uses the animation to draw
the audience in and make it care about what being said on screen. When a speaker talks
about the Absurd, little shapes jump out of his ears and run around the screen dressed
as Shiners. When another makes an important point, an explosion goes off behind
him. In another scene, a character is driving around town with a megaphone on top of his car, and
he spews out his dialogue Larouche-style.
And once the man begins to get his bearings and take control of his dream, though,
the film becomes a lot more fun. He starts to engage the people he meets, learning
to manipulate his surroundings and coming to grips with the differences between his
waking life and his dream life — it's reminiscent of Jacob's
Ladder, minus the pointy-tailed demons.
Coming off of a string of mainstream films like The Newton Boys and Before
Sunrise, it's good to see Linklater returning to the experimental strategies he used
so deftly in "Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused" — loosely defined narratives,
de-emphasized main characters and blurred scene sequencings. But it's hard to say
that he's really back — "Waking Life" may be, in some ways, less engaging than his
earlier films, but it's also a novel, more mature approach to age-old questions about
reality and self. The film's format reflects its themes so exactly that it's hard to
imagine it being made any other way. Don't expect much in terms of acting, but in
Waking Life it's hardly important.
— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)
