home
| art & architecture | books & cds | dance
| destinations | film | opera | television | theater | archives
|
||
|
||
It's often been said that there's nothing more boring than listening
to someone else describe their dreams. But what if they could show them to you? Movies would seem to be an ideal vessel for
bringing dreams to life, but very few filmmakers have been successful at doing so, or even
attempted it (aside from the sort of hackneyed dream sequences found in horror films). Luis Bunuel and David Lynch are the first names
to spring to mind, and now, with his one-of-a-kind animated feature Waking Life, Richard Linklater brings his own
dream world to the screen.
Linklater's debut feature, Slacker, began with
a young traveler (played by the director himself) waking on a bus and then describing his
dream to the taxi driver who picks him up at the depot.
Waking Life also begins with a young
traveler, this time on a train, but whether he ever really wakes up becomes one of the
central questions of this often mind-bending film.
This opening is only the first of many similarities to Slacker, the low budget epic-in-microcosm that
helped launch a new wave of independent filmmaking in the 90's. As in that film, Linklater's camera prowls the
streets of Austin, Texas, encountering one talkative oddball or street-level philosopher
after another. Some of the same characters
recur - or at least the same actors, in similar variations on their real-life personas
(Louis Mackey, The Old Anarchist who raved about Charles Whitman's shooting spree from the
University of Texas Tower, is the most recognizable). In
fact, all of Linklater's films are revisited, either through characters (Ethan Hawke and
Julie Delpy reprising their Before Sunrise
roles) or locations (the Circle A convenience store from subUrbia, the
Paramount Theater as seen in The Newton Boys).
The connective tissue is the
young dreamer, played by Wiley Wiggins, who served as a Linklater surrogate in Dazed and Confused
and perhaps does so here as well. Wiggins
drifts from place to place, sometimes literally floating, bombarded all the way with words
of wisdom or flights of fancy. The people he
encounters are a mix of nationally known figures (director Steven Soderbergh, Speed
Levitch of The Cruise) and
Austin-centric notables (musician Guy Forsythe, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones). Not all of these individuals or their ideas are
equally compelling, but the giddy visuals compensate for the more lackluster stretches of
dialogue. Originally shot on digital video, Waking Life has been transformed into a cartoon
through an animation process developed by Bob Sabiston.
Using computer software, animators were able to draw on top of the edited video
footage. With each new scene, a different
artist takes the reigns, resulting in a fluid, continually evolving picture. The images ebb and flow like ocean waves, which
may be problematic for viewers susceptible to sea sickness, but will prove entrancing to
those on Linklater's wavelength.
Waking Life lacks much of
the quirky humor that made Slacker such a unique
delight. The characters are less specific and
distinctive, and some of their more abstracted musings might be insufferable in a
live-action picture. But the picture hits a
groove at about the halfway point, when Wiggins enters a room populated by lucid dreamers
and comes to understand that he is trapped in a perpetual dream state. By now, the movie has lulled us into a similar
state, and when it's over, we may not want to wake up.
Linklater seemed to lose his way in the late 90's, proving a poor match
for the bombastic Eric Bogosian Gen-X rant subUrbia and
the too-slick bank robber saga The Newton Boys. With Waking
Life, he has recaptured the free-form storytelling and gift of gab that made his early
films special. Take the movie's ideas with a
grain of salt - this isn't a lecture, after all, and even Linklater has acknowledged that Waking Life is more of a pot brownie than a
five-course meal. He's selling himself short,
though - compared to most of 2001's stale, unimaginative fare, Waking Life is a feast indeed.
- Scott Von Doviak
