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A Scanner Darkly Our rating: Rate this movie   Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for drug and sexual content, language and a brief violent image) Genre: Animated, Science Fiction Theater release: July 07, 2006 by Warner Independent Directed by: Richard Linklater Runtime: 2 hours 20 minutes Cast: Keanu Reeves (Agent Fred/Bob), Winona Ryder (Donna), Robert Downey Jr. (Barris), Woody Harrelson (Luckman), Rory Cochrane (Freck). Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

In Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, Keanu Reeves plays "Agent Fred," an undercover officer in America's war on drugs. He's so deeply undercover that he's become a drug addict himself, losing touch with reality. So the irony is painful when Agent Fred is ordered to focus his investigation on one junkie in particular … himself.

Sound a bit familiar? Like Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly is based on the science fiction of Philip K. Dick. All three introduce us to law enforcement officers who begin by tracking criminals and end up running from the law, dismayed at what they're learning about themselves.

But where Blade Runner and Minority Report borrowed the main ideas and added all kinds of violence and thrills, Linklater's movie is actually faithful to Dick's novel. A Scanner Darkly is true to Dick's disillusioned, drug-addled, deadbeat characters. It's a much more thoughtful film—challenging, meditative, and sad, just the way Dick intended it.

Scanner focuses on the small Anaheim community in which Agent Fred pretends to be a dealer. His "friends" are mopey slackers, tormented by the distortions brought on by a cruel, enslaving drug called "Substance D." (The "D" may stand for death, disintegration, or despair.) "You're either on it," says addict James Barris, "or you haven't tried it."

Keanu Reeves plays the role of Bob Arctor and Agent Fred, one and the same

As his brain reels with foolish fantasies, Barris (Robert Downey Jr.) lectures others on things he knows nothing about—guns, the chemistry of narcotics, and government conspiracies. He has a captive audience. Wide-eyed and paranoid, Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson) is a typical southern California stoner, prone to freaking out. But Luckman is stable compared to Charles Freck (Rory Cochrane). Freck is a wreck who resembles The Lord of the Rings' Gollum in his fits of twitching and terror. In the opening scene, he obsessively scrubs himself and his dog, convinced that they're both besieged by giant aphids.

The guys are attracted to Donna Hawthorne, the sexy girlfriend of their housemate Bob Arctor. But Donna (Winona Ryder, in a welcome return to intelligent moviemaking) responds to Substance D by loathing the thought of physical intimacy. This drives Bob crazy. Unable to consummate his relationship with Donna, he uses drugs to buy sex with someone else, which leads to even nastier surprises.

What the group doesn't know is that their friend Bob is actually Agent Fred. Behind their backs, Fred is documenting their crimes with elaborate surveillance equipment.

But the drugs are tearing Fred's endeavors apart. The two hemispheres of his brain are fighting with each other, troubling his sense of identity. Is he really a cop pretending to be a dealer? Or is he a dealer who excuses his habit by posing as a cop?

Winona Ryder as Donna Hawthorne

To give audiences a palpable sense of Fred's delusion, Linklater uses the same style of animation that made his earlier film Waking Life so hypnotic. Animators "paint" over footage of the actors' performances, using an innovative computer process called "rotoscoping." In this way, these cartoon characters become hauntingly lifelike, preserving real movements, gestures, expressions, even scenery. Their outlines are unstable, and so is their environment, keeping us caught in a constant state of questioning the film's "reality," just as its characters do. It's like living in a Kafka nightmare—a person chatting in your living room might suddenly transform into a cockroach.

The animators' greatest accomplishment is the realization of the "scramble suits"—the agents' full-body disguises. Made from an electrical fabric, conglomerations of human features mix and match on their surface, disguising the wearer with a random collage of races, ages, hairstyles, and outfits. This gives the agents anonymity at the office, protecting their operations. The scramble suits made Dick's novel unfilmable for decades. Through Linklater's technique, they're astonishing.

And they're more than just a special effect. The suits make us think about ways in which people are pressured to meet society's shifting expectations, or how they lose their individuality by conforming to "the system." And they suggest that any agent of authority may conceal secret agendas within the "costume" of duty.

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