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| Somebody’s
watching: Reeves, animated, in A Scanner Darkly. |
An
Evil Within
By Shawn Stone
A
Scanner Darkly
Directed
by Richard Linklater
It’s hard to top the terrors of contemporary reality, but
writer-director Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly
presents an vision of “seven years from now” so awful as to
give even the paranoid pause. Based on the book by Philip
K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly is a frightening vision of
a government with unlimited surveillance powers and a people
lost in a downward spiral of increasingly powerful drugs.
Everyone in the story is watching everyone else. Officer Fred
(no last names), played by Keanu Reeves, is part of a counter-narco-terror
unit in which the members wear “scramble suits” that constantly
shape-shift, keeping the cops’ identities secret from even
each other; Fred lives undercover as “Bob Arctor,” a drug
addict, in a ramshackle California ranch house with a couple
of other drug addicts, Barris (a frightening Robert Downey
Jr.) and Luckman (Woody Harrelson). They’re all strung out
on a new drug, “Substance D,” which slowly destroys their
minds. Bob’s girlfriend Donna (Winona Ryder) deals “D,” but
prefers old-fashioned cocaine for her high of choice.
“Scramble
suits”? No, these are not rendered in some CGI weirdness;
A Scanner Darkly uses rotoscope animation, in which
live-action film is digitally “painted over” to create a disorienting,
animated image. The technique is suited to the material.
Linklater’s first animation/live-action hybrid, Waking
Life, was mesmerizing and nauseating. The former is meant
figuratively, as the film’s images were inventive, ever-changing
and often beautiful; the latter term is meant literally. After
45 minutes of loopy, smearing imagery and nonstop chatter
and blather, I started to feel sick. Happily, the technique
has been refined—or Linklater has restrained himself—in A
Scanner Darkly. The interface between live action and
animation is more subtle; when the imagery is taken to extremes,
it’s for a solid dramatic purpose. While the scramble suits
are the most obvious example of, well, scrambled visuals,
at times you’ll be stopped short by outdoor shots that don’t
seem retouched at all. It’s another way of keeping the audience
guessing about how much of what is being shown is “real.”
The paranoia gets wilder as the characters sink deeper into
drug use. Bob/Fred is starting to slip into psychosis; the
police doctors can’t—or won’t—tell him what’s really going
on with his brain. Barris gets meaner and scarier; in one
scene, he lets one of his compadres almost die. The fact that
we can’t be sure whether this is because Barris is a sociopath
or is just strung out adds to the feeling of dread. In a story
filled with awful events, we know that something really terrible
is going to happen.
The ending ties up all the loose ends almost too well, and
has a slight hint of hope that seems strange after the crushing—if
entertaining—downer that is most of the story. Still, A
Scanner Darkly stays with you, its ghostly images of doomed
drug addicts and faceless, fascist cops lingering like so
much digital residue in your brain.
Yo-Ho-Hum
Pirates
of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
Directed
by Gore Verbinski
The nice thing about Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s
Chest is that it reunites not just the swashbuckling trio
of Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), noble Will Turner (Orlando
Bloom) and plucky Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) from the
first Pirates movie, but also the colorful side characters
who stole scenes from their more famous counterparts. First
mate Gibbs (Kevin McNally) is on hand to help steer the Black
Pearl away from the clutches of a vengeful Davy Jones (Bill
Nighy with a computer- generated, squidlike face). Ruffian
deckhands Ragetti (Mackenzie Crook) and Cotton (David Bailie)
lend much-needed humor, particularly when providing unexpected
analyses of things like the Bible or the motive behind a three-way
sword fight. Most surprising is the return of Commodore Norrington
(Jack Davenport), who is a much-changed man in this sequel.
Clearly, director Gore Verbinski knows where his bread—or,
in this case, popcorn—is buttered, and he strives mightily
to give us matinee-goers a lot to munch on. In this installment,
Jack is on the run from Jones, and everybody, it seems, is
out to get whatever’s hidden in Davy’s chest. The bad guys
here are the East India Trading Company, personified by the
stuffy Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander); they are consistently
greedy and unchivalrous, whereas the pirates are consistently
inconsistent when it comes to troubling things like motive
and allegiance. Oh, and did I mention the cannibals? Or Davy’s
crew of dead sailors turned mutant sea creatures? Or the kraken,
Davy’s pet leviathan, which makes several thunderous appearances?
The trouble is that there’s just too much going on, so much
so that it’s hard to keep track of that minor annoyance called
plot. With the exception of some wonderfully executed gags
reminiscent of Bugs Bunny, the movie lacks centralized interest.
Toward the end, things pick up, and decisions and actions
suddenly have real import. In particular, Elizabeth’s and
Jack’s final scene hint at something far more intriguing than
anything in the preceding two hours and 40 minutes. It makes
you very eager to see Installment Three, that is, after you
get over your annoyance that you’ve had to endure what is
essentially the cinematic equivalent of a sandwich minus the
bread and then have to wait a year to see its conclusion.
Then again, perhaps we need that long to fully digest all
the details of the story.
While Knightley is first-rate in a sort of Maureen O’Hara
kind of way, and Bloom does his dreamy-eyed braveheart thing
well enough, Depp largely squanders the interest we felt for
Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of
the Black Pearl. Then, his unusual choices and unexpected
tics made for a thoroughly enjoyable, irreverent riff on the
swashbuckler image as personified by Douglas Fairbanks or
Errol Flynn. Here, however, he goes too much into the campy;
Depp is all big eyes and twisted grin, mincing step and swaggering
pinky. Whereas Jack Sparrow had formerly been a remarkably
unique characterization, in Dead Man’s Chest he comes
off as pure caricature. Let’s hope that by next year, he gets
his groove back.
—Laura
Leon
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