Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Waking Life

Movie Guru Rating:
Enlightening (4 out of 5)

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Waking Life is all talk, no action

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

There are some weeks that try the patience of even the most elevated Movie Guru. These are the weeks that, for reasons known only to the keepers of the entertainment calendar, have been declared dumping time for the dregs of the system, weeks when the studio stables are mucked and the refuse placed in great heaping fly-infested piles down at the local megaplex, weeks when no amount of stadium seating and Dolby digital sound and grease-pooled popcorn can keep the horror at bay. Weeks like last week.

The only new films on offer were something called Behind Enemy Lines, which from what I can tell consists of Gene Hackman's veins bulging while Owen Wilson runs around in the snow and keeps falling down, and Texas Rangers, a let's-play-cowboy Western with the guy from Dawson's Creek and the stoner dude from That '70s Show. Ack. Gack. I couldn't take it. It may cost me some enlightenment points with the Great Hooded Guru, but I could not bring myself to spend the equivalent of a large pizza on either slice of moldy Hollywood ham.

Instead, I went to see a movie I wanted to see, a movie that has been out for a few weeks and, I realize, may actually have left town by the time you read this. No matter. In the modern age, movies never really go away. It'll be out on video—and even better, DVD—within months. And unlike either of the above-mentioned films, about which I can only say you're on your own, this movie—Waking Life—is worth the effort to track down.

Or actually, it's worth the effort on some conditions. If the idea of an entire film made up of animated scenes of people talking (and talking, and talking) about life and death and dreams and reality and the nature of existence sounds boring as hell to you, then Waking Life is not really a good option. You might enjoy bits and pieces, but as a whole, the movie is going to seem like a wandering, pretentious bull session, and even the animation is going to get on your nerves (especially the way all the objects in the background keep floating around drunkenly—Dramamine alert!).

Really, that's how the whole thing struck me, too. But I liked it.

Waking Life is one of two new movies from indie avatar Richard Linklater (the other being the soon-to-arrive Tape), and it's a return of sorts to the style of Slacker, the film that launched his career a decade ago. With its episodic, anecdotal structure, Slacker gave both a name and an ironic form to the youth culture of the early 1990s. Douglas Coupland's "Generation X" was the tag that stuck, probably because it was malleable enough to mean anything to anyone, but "slacker" was the more trenchant and subversive label.

Since then, Linklater has worked more conventional territory, albeit usually with intelligence and wit—'70s teen nostalgia in Dazed and Confused, strangers-on-a-train romance in Before Sunrise, the Eric Bogosian play subUrbia, even straight-up Hollywood shoot-'em-up in The Newton Boys. Waking Life puts him squarely back in experimental mode.

The most radical departure is in the film's look. It is animated, but not like any cartoon you've ever seen. Linklater filmed the entire movie with actors playing the scenes and then hired a team of animators to draw on top of the filmed images. Ralph Bakshi and others used a similar method in the 1970s—it's called rotoscoping—but Waking Life is much more fully realized than any of those efforts. Although occasionally you get a glimpse of the "real" people beneath their cartoon counterparts, the digitally enhanced animation holds together seamlessly. And while strange things sometimes happen during the movie (people levitate, monkeys lecture), most of the visual play is contained to the shifting light and lines of people's faces as they talk. The overall effect is of seeing the world through a plasma kaleidoscope; everything feels real but exaggerated in unexpected ways.

The story, such as it is, follows the experiences of a young man (Wiley Wiggins) who becomes increasingly convinced he's dreaming and can't wake up. He drifts through classrooms and cafés and kitchens and jail cells, sometimes talking to people and sometimes just listening in on conversations. Most of the talk revolves around the big, basic questions: who are we, where are we, how did we come here, and why? What are dreams, really? What is consciousness? What is time? And, of course, what is death?

That latter question slowly takes over, folding all the others into itself, as the protagonist starts to wonder if he may actually be dead—or more specifically, in some transitional state between life and death. This is the kind of speculative pondering that can make for religious revelation, great science fiction, impenetrable philosophical essays, or stoned babble. And it's fair to say Waking Life indulges in all of the above. Some of the conversationalists and monologists (who include Before Sunrise stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, director Steven Soderbergh, and Linklater himself) sound like they're tuned into secrets of the universe. Others are just tuned into themselves. How much sense any one of them makes to you inevitably depends on your own positions on the spectrums of philosophy and faith. It's unclear how much of the dialogue is scripted and how much is drawn from off-the-cuff conversation, and that in itself is a testament to Linklater's fluid approach.

As I said, Waking Life will bore the pants off of some people and irritate others. But for me, a movie that spends 90 minutes asking "Why am I here?" is infinitely preferable to one that makes me spend 90 minutes asking the same question.