MOVIE REVIEW 'Scanner Darkly' shows dark world

Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson and Robert Downy Jr. star.
By CRAIG OUTHIER
ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Having plumbed the lighter side of narcotics in "Dazed and Confused" (1993), filmmaker Richard Linklater descends into a bleak netherworld of addiction and squalor in "A Scanner Darkly," his troubling, ticklishly absurd portrait of chemical escapism run amok.
Adapted from the novel by sci-fi seer Philip K. Dick with exacting faithfulness (Linklater even preserves the late author's rambling dedication to his many friends felled by drug use), "Scanner" employs the same shimmering visual aftereffect -- known as "interpolated rotoscoping" -- that made Linklater's "Waking Life" (2001) such a blissfully disorienting delight. The effect is somewhat more ornamental here, suggesting a sustained hallucinatory buzz.
Such is the state of mind of one Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves, at his befuddled best), an undercover narcotics agent who falls under the spell of Substance D, a powerful recreational drug so named for causing "dumbness, despair, desertion and death." Fully a fifth of America is addicted to some drug or another in Dick's near-future, spawning a massive chemical-dependency industry (addicts are sent to a program called New Path, sort of the Enron of detox) and invasive, Big Brother-style state surveillance on every street and driveway.
Arctor -- who, in one of his sad, wandering reveries, admits that he gladly abandoned his wife and children and predictable, workaday world for the "horrors" and "little wonders" of addiction -- lives in a festering tract home with a pair of D-addled moochers: James Barris, a snide provocateur played by Robert Downey Jr., and Ernie Luckman, a gullible dope with ludicrous fashion sense played by Woody Harrelson. In classic stoner fashion, Arctor and his friends struggle through moments, whipping each other into a paranoid frenzy over matters as slight as an unclaimed cigarette butt, to achingly funny effect. Downey does a particularly excellent piece of acting, letting Barris' manic articulations and crazed ramblings bubble up from who-knows-what-recess of his own, hard-traveled soul.
Unbeknownst to his roommates -- or to his winsome drug-dealer girlfriend, Donna (Winona Ryder) -- Arctor is simultaneously casing them for leads in the ongoing war against Substance D, which the authorities claim is manufactured by foreign terrorists. By virtue of a "scramble suit" that projects a surreal, ever-shifting welter of human forms, Arctor's true identity is not even known to his superior, the like-attired Hank. In the movie's defining inside-out moment, Hank suggests to Arctor that Arctor might be his lead suspect. Arctor, with his severed brain hemispheres, thinks he might be right.
Themes
Such themes of fractured identity are endemic to Dick's vision of the future, but "Scanner" -- unlike "Total Recall" and "Blade Runner," both based on his stories -- lacks the neat, conventional shape to make good on the hook. This is not a ride in any sense; it's despairing, diffuse and just a bit ponderous, with an implication of capitalist corruption to rival anything in Linklater's upcoming "Fast Food Nation."
It shows us something far-out but not so far-fetched: An establishment so screwed up that that it can actually match the paranoid delusions of its most deranged outcasts beat-for-beat.