What does a scanner see? Into the head? Into the heart? So goes the description on the back of the box for 'A Scanner Darkly.' The same questions could also be asked of the works of the late author Philip K. Dick. The sci-fi legend, who penned such seminal epics as 'Blade Runner,' 'Total Recall,' 'Minority Report,' 'Paycheck' and 'Screamers,' was obsessed with the merging of the existential, the technological and the human throughout his career. It was a happy marriage, at least in book form -- his novels are classics, and he almost single-handedly created a new subgenre of science fiction, tech noir. Hard-boiled, drenched in futuristic detail and filled with cynical, world-weary characters, it's a style that remains hugely influential today, even if few outside of its creator have ever seemed to get it right.
'A Scanner Darkly' is classic Dick. The time is just beyond now. The place is suburbia. The story is a darkly twisted, yet humorous tale of people hooked on Substance D, and a government that cheerfully destroys its citizens -- their rights and their relationships -- in order to save them. Robert Downey, Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder and Rory Cochrane play strung-out friends terrified of each other, and of spies. Keanu Reeves plays one of those spies, who also happens to be one of the friends -- until his two personalities begin to split. And you thought Big Brother was a bitch.
The film itself is bit all over the place -- part sci-fi, part detective story, part slacker comedy, Linklater never seems to settle on the right tone. To be fair, Dick is tough to adapt, not the least of which because his crusty, stylized dialogue often comes off as affected and phony when spoken on-screen (just witness Harrison Ford's faux-Dick, tacked-on narration for the theatrical cut of 'Blade Runner' to see the approach taken to its worst extreme). Perhaps Linklater was not the ideal choice, then, for 'A Scanner Darkly' -- he's a filmmaker who excels with more improvised, character-driven efforts, such as the virtually plotless 'Dazed d Confused' and his excellent bookends 'Before Sunrise' and 'Before Sunset.' But here, with such dense material, he's just not able to balance the thematic complexities of the original story together with the more organic performances of his cast.
'A Scanner Darkly' is stimulating, however, in terms of its politics. I love subversive material like this -- as originally written, Dick's future tale was a thinly-veiled allegory for the Nixon years. Himself a target of the early war on drugs, Dick slyly incorporated both sides of the issue without coming to any moralistic, simplistic conclusions. Yes, drugs can be bad -- but so can the means used to stop users from abusing them. Even in half-baked cinematic form, 'A Scanner Darkly' tackles a subject head-on that few other Hollywood films (outside of perhaps Steven Soderbergh's 'Traffic') have dared to approach with such complexity.
