Bob Arctor has an understandable identity crisis. He’s got a thing for a girl with a fear of physical intimacy. He has a house that may have been home to his wife and two children — though he isn’t sure of that — but is now the crash pad for a trio of stoners who are alternately hilarious and horrific.
Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is also an undercover narcotics agent. Make that deep undercover: like the other narcs, he wears a full body suit that obscures his identity by flashing images of different men and women every second. So deep undercover that the cops don't know who he is, and vice versa.
It’s the near future, when the wars on drugs and terror have morphed together. Electronic surveillance of citizens is accepted by both sides of the law. Arctor, struggling to hide his own addiction to the hallucinogenic "Substance D" from government doctors, takes on a new assignment of round-the-clock surveillance on a suspected drug dealer: himself.
Arctor’s tale is told in "A Scanner Darkly," director Richard Linklater’s animated adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel. It’s the second time Linklater ("Dazed and Confused") has used a method called "interpolated rotoscoping" to turn live-action photography into a walking, talking graphic novel. The first attempt was "Waking Life," which was less a film than an excuse to use the technology. With "Scanner," the method is imperative to bring those shape-shifting police suits and Arctor’s drug-induced hallucinations to life. It also helps the actors; even as Keanu does the "stick it to the man" druggie he’s been playing since "The River’s Edge," those animated shadows dancing across his face and hair affix a profundity to his performance. The animation also enhances Winona Ryder’s accessible beauty as Arctor’s girlfriend.
Futuristic police states aside, this is a film about drug addiction. Arctor’s friends reach represent a deeper level of pharmaceutical obsession: Luckman (Woody Harrelson) is a witty recreational user; Barris (Robert Downey, Jr., doing a caffeinated version of Jeff Goldblum and stealing every scene he’s in) is a dangerous paranoid; and Freck (Rory Cochrane) is the extreme end-all, flicking away invisible bugs when he isn’t considering suicide.
"A Scanner Darkly" works best when examining societal reaction to those addicts. One character laments that the "D" in "Substance D" is "Death," and he’s right: to the authority figures, you’re either alive and clean or dead and addicted. It’s a black-and-white world where Rorschach tests are now close-ended questions. Even if the drug users seek redemption, what if the disease and the cure are coming from the same source?
The film expertly tackles these issues in its first two acts, and Linklater builds bonds between the characters through several amusing vignettes. But those bonds — and logic — are nowhere to be found in the film’s laborious denouncement, which crams an hour’s worth of exposition and plot twists into its sputtering final minutes.
As a cinematic drug, "A Scanner Darkly" is a great buzz with a lousy comedown.