Animated Drugs'r Bad M'Kay?

Actually, Substance D looks really, really good

A Scanner Darkly

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder

Rated: R

One of Robert Downey Jr.'s first lines in A Scanner Darkly is his most logical of the film: "You're either addicted, or you've never tried it."

He's referring to Substance D -- a drug that appears to mix the lethargy of pot, the alertness of coke and the brain-frying of ecstasy. (It's fictional, of course. Sorry if that got your hopes up). Keanu Reeves, playing undercover cop Bob Arctor, is one of these addicts, as are his supposed friends, Downey's motor-mouthed James Barris and aged surfer Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson). The three live in Anaheim "seven years from now" in Arctor's home, a compact designed for a compact family.

As we hear early on -- and unfortunately rarely again -- it did house Arctor's family, before he got hooked on D, ("Death"). Throughout the film he alludes to this abandoned family with the line "I have two little daughters -- little ones." But that's about as well as his memory will serve him.

Scanner is based on the sci-fi novel by Philip K. Dick, from whose pen such movies as Minority Report and Blade Runner were adapted. Arctor and his friends' struggles with drugs closely mirror Dick's own (as is made blatantly clear in the film's coda). Director Richard Linklater's challenge, then, was to recreate Dick's bleak vivacity on screen.

Linklater tries to accomplish this with some groundbreaking ... er ... cinematography?

The film itself was only shot in 24 days, but that only began the process. The live footage was then painted over, shot by shot. Laborious doesn't even begin to describe the process -- it required over 500 hours to paint one minute (!) of Scanner.

So was it worth it?

Richard Linklater is a talented enough guy, so I won't call the technique a gimmick. He tries to feed the audience Substance D without their knowing. Admittedly, the animation will mess you up every now and then, and that's just great.

Thing is, you'll want more than eye candy. The cop-out for Scanner's obvious plot holes would be that if Arctor can't remember it, then we won't see it. Yes and no -- while we want the film to remain oblique, we also want to sympathize more with Arctor, and we need to know more. How did he become an undercover cop who spies on his friends? How is this an escape from ennui? Or is his family just a hallucination?

Linklater tries to tie things up at the very end, and it turns out that the undercover investigation -- and production -- of Substance D goes much deeper than it seems. It's great. Why couldn't we see more of it earlier, though? Much too much time is spent watching Reeves, Downey and Harrelson's stoned perambulations, giving a seemingly rich plot short shrift.

I can't dislike this movie though. It's nice to see Linklater, a cult favorite, step away from his recent family film foray; and Downey, though overwritten, is ceaselessly funny. And it's moving to boot.

If only some animation hours had been spent reworking the film's structure, it would be easy to get addicted to this film.

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