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Keanu Reeves in A Scanner Darkly.
When filmmakers translate a novel to the screen, there are those in the audience who will insist on a tale truly told. You know these people. They watch for chapter-by-chapter accuracy, note the character and scene divergences and hold up omission as proof of a conversion flaw. They’re literalists — true believers — and they don’t take edits, updates or tangential inspirations lightly.
And then, there those who hunger for something more transcendent. These viewers salivate less for a reproduction and more for a tasty amalgam of a beloved book’s narrative depth charged with big-screen light and magic.
Veracious or visionary? Searching for accuracy or striving for poetry? Translation all comes down to choices, and the filmmaker who tackles dearly loved material will always find himself unable to please all of the audience all of the time.
This may be particularly true in the world of sci-fi, a genre notoriously crowded with passionate nitpickers. In taking on A Scanner Darkly, director/writer Richard Linklater seems to have walked lightly — and literally — through a maze of tough choices affecting a widely beloved story produced by sci-fi scion Philip K. Dick.
In both the film and the original novel of the same name, the protagonist (Keanu Reeves) is both suspected drug user Bob Arctor and veiled narcotics agent Fred, an undercover police agent assigned to monitor Bob Arctor. Meanwhile, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey, Jr., Winona Ryder and Rory Cochrane take on roles as various members of Bob Arctor’s circle of friends (also under surveillance by Agent Fred). The drug in question here is Substance D, a new and powerful psychoactive agent that eventually causes severe neurocognitive impairment in its users.
PKD placed the novel in 1994, but used ’70s slang in the dialogue. Though Linklater’s version makes some necessary edits for length and updates the scenery, vernacular and pop-culture references, he leaves the story — and the classic Dick dystopia of drug abuse, perspective loss and identity crisis — largely intact.
Through computer-supported rotoscoping (an intensely time-consuming process involving hand-traced transformation from film to individual animation frames, which are then sewn together with a little cutting-edge software magic) Linklater facilitates the audience’s disorienting tour through Philip K. Dick land — that grimy, unsettling world of ambivalent relationships between the ally and the adversary, the cop and the criminal, the watcher and the watched.
PKD’s sci-fi stories have been Hollywood darlings for years (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, Screamers, etc.) though the screen renderings typically range from the "based on" category to the "inspired by" bin. Sadly, the films have also varied wildly in quality.
Thankfully, Linklater’s crew of veteran actors (Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey, Jr., Winona Ryder, Rory Cochrane) maneuver their characters with panache and his animation choice produces both an unnerving environment and a slick solution for the special effects required to illustrate the story’s drug hallucinations and ultramodern technology.
It’s an enjoyable — if not terribly impressive — film, and Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly now carries the distinction of being Hollywood’s most meticulous PKD performance. (Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, which claimed merely inspiration from PKD’s "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" doggedly remains the best of the bunch.)
The film may not elevate Dick’s written vision, but it certainly fulfills its obligations (even going so far as to preserve the author’s heartbreaking dedication). And ultimately, that’s a win for (almost) everyone.
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